r/SSX

Very recently, modding community member Archy purchased and dumped a Preview build of SSX 3 dated July 31st, roughly 2 months before release. What we found on the disc was nothing short of a miracle - a FULL BUILD (NOT A DEMO) from the early beta phase of development with tons of content that was either cut before release and never seen by the public, or extremely early versions of things we have seen. This is also very likely the build of the game used to record some of the shots seen in the final release's pre-rendered intro cutscene.

https://hiddenpalace.org/SSX_3_(Jul_17,_2003_prototype)

A very small selection notable differences (listing the things that aren't different would be MUCH easier):

• It runs at 60 frames per second, and Metro City's framelimiter hasn't been added yet. It seems that the early demos weren't capped to 30 frames per second because that's what the developers were targetting, rather the game was going to run at 60 from the start, but the early builds were terribly unoptimized and have lots of stuttering, this not being visible at 30 frames per second.

• The Early Atomika voice actor is present and has several new voice lines recorded, including a bunch unused in the game data as well. There's now enough evidence to say that this unknown person wasn't simply a stand-in for Mark Hildreth, but rather EA's original choice. Early French Atomika, Early German Atomika, and Early Spanish Atomika are also present.

• "Get Retarded" by the Black Eyed Peas is present, and some songs like "Rock Star" are also completely uncensored. All mentions of Goldfrapp and Kazzer were removed.

• Extremely early track designs. Peak 1 mostly resembles the Beta Demo, however most of Peak 2 and all of Peak 3 are using their Pre-Alpha designs. I'd seriously give Throne and Black Station a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeXAV1cnxF8

• The debug menu exists, accessible by pressing Circle in the pause menu. This is also the first publicly-available console build to contain a working debug freecam, which you can access by holding L3 and pressing R2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSDALFjqu0A

• Lots of cut clothing items are present, including an even more skin-exposed bikini top for Elise and an inflatable duck inner-tube for Moby, plus so much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsx4z8lKdv4

• Transporting plays a unique music track which was in the Pre-Alpha Demo, but unused, and its purpose couldn't be identified at the time. Peak 2 and Peak 3 hub music is VERY different.

• Menus are newer than the designs seen in the Pre-Alpha demo but slightly older than the Beta Demo. The scapped "session cost" feature, which required you to pay to teleport around tracks, is present and fully functional. The pre-race Rider Aggression menu is also here and presumably works fine.

• So, so, SO much more, including a bunch of unused gamedata on the disc hinting at more features that got scrapped. If anyone attempts to create a page on The Cutting Room Floor for this build, it may be one of the biggest pages on the website. It's clear that over half of the content for SSX 3 got scrapped.

Note that if you choose to play this build, you'll want to grab the PCSX2 PNACH (PCSX2 2.0+ extremely highly recommended, pre-1.7 builds are a massive detriment to you, the user, seriously, update) cheat from the Internet Archive mirror. This game is set to intentionally crash and display a detailed crash message if even the slightest error happens, which was very useful for the developers to find bugs, but most if them aren't gamebreaking to us. The included patch disables the intentional crashing, leaving only the actual unsolvable crashes. It's not compatible with real hardware and never will be due to its enormous size.

On Jeff Gerstmann’s podcast this week he recieved an anonymous email saying the following; (The Jeff Gerstmann Show - Six Hours Early On Netflix (11/08/26)

Anonymous from Vancouver writes in.

It says, read your discussion about SSX the other week.

It's funny that you mentioned skate because if that had hit, like it was supposed to, the plan was to basically make a new SSX inside of it, travel to a different zone to do snowboard stuff, and so on, might have been cool, but probably not.

Interesting take, can’t say it would have been any good considering how lukewarm the reception to the new Skate has been but it’s nice to dream about getting a new one.