Someone’s been pulling a bunch of unused stuff out of Bully

Bully was one of those games from a decade when something new that became a hit wasn’t immediately followed by a sequel and all the expectations of being a major franchise. In fact, while it did get a remaster for Xbox 360 two years after its 2006 launch, Bully is still one of those games that fans wonder if Rockstar will ever return to.

Youtuber and bigtime Bully enthusiast SWEGTA says he got hold of a beta of the game a while back and the volume of stuff he’s pulled from it over the past year or so would seem to prove that claim. His latest finding is a bizarre alternate theme from Mr. Hattrick’s math classes.

That sounds like some stuff for the Halloween mission. For context, the actual Hattrick theme is an upbeat rock number. (Others have pointed out that the alternate theme played in a sped-up form if the player was running out of time at the end of the test. I wouldn’t know because I aced all mine.)

But he’s also churned up these nine things cut from the final game (nearly a year ago):

And a look at some mid-boss battle cutscenes that were eliminated — probably because of the loading time demand and interruption they would have meant to the PlayStation 2 version.

A long list of beta changes has been logged on Bully’s wikia page, too.

The last news on Bully was the usual round of porting to mobile and remastering for PlayStation 4 that Rockstar performed on its Grand Theft Auto titles of that era. There’s nothing new to suggest Rockstar will ever resurrect the franchise. Going through all this deleted stuff and thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember that part of the game,” is the only way to get anything new out of a one-hit wonder.