A canceled NES multiplayer game and SNES RTS have been saved "and preserved" from the unflinching incinerator of gaming history, and a new "cart release" might be on the horizon

Game preservation can touch everything from the most beloved classics to absolute obscurities, and all that work is valuable – but I'm not sure I've ever had occasion to cover anything quite so obscure as the two games I'm about to tell you about. Retro-focused publisher Piko Interactive has just acquired the rights to a pair of games that barely constitute a footnote in the gaming history books, and I think that's beautiful.

"We have officially acquired the rights and preserved the unreleased games by Equilibrium named Defectors! (NES) and Warrior of Rome III (SNES)," according to a tweet from Piko (via Time Extension). It's unclear whether either of these games were anywhere near a finished, releasable state, but in a follow-up post, Piko suggests that "snes cart release" for Warrior of Rome 3 could be on the horizon.

So what are these games, and who is developer Equilibrium? That is a terrific question, and one you need to dig into obscure wikis and fansites run by historians to get anything approaching an answer to. The official Equilibrium website now belongs to a decades-old automation company currently hawking AI, and it's a studio so obscure that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page.

No, your primary source for Equilibrium info in 2025 is going to be an ancient 2006 article from the fansite NESWorld, which offers a few details on the company based on interviews with former developers. Based in Sausalito, California, Equilibrium developed just a handful of games released in the early '90s before moving into imaging software and ultimately disappearing into the mists of history.

That article describes Defectors! as similar to arcade classic Berzerk, where you shoot small robots from a top-down perspective. The key feature here was four-player multiplayer, and you'd collect points as you competed to turn the robots to your character's color. The graphics are extremely basic by 1990 standards, when the last known prototype of the game was found, so perhaps there's little wonder it was cancelled. Nevertheless, there's something here that reminds me of modern couch multiplayer indies, and I'm very curious if the version Piko's gotten ahold of is any further along.

Warrior of Rome 3 made it at least as far as the Consumer Electronics Show floor in 1993, and it got a few writeups in magazines like Nintendo Power, but little information about the game is still floating around. The first two Warrior of Rome games were RTS titles developed exclusively for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis by a company called Micronet, but Piko says this sequel was "sort of its own thing that just licensed the name."

Are either of these games any good at all? No idea! But I'm delighted that they're getting a second chance at life. Gaming history is filled with forgotten ideas and canceled projects that never saw the light of day, and it's wonderful to see the work of old-school developers get highlighted all these years later.

You don't have to be among the best NES games or best SNES games to be worthy of preservation.