Alone: The Horror Begins, the first ever J2ME Horror game.
Alone: The Horror Begins, the first ever J2ME Horror game.
Alone: The Horror Begins is allegedly (more on that later) a J2ME game developed by Centrescore, a company I can barely find any information about. This company is hard to track down. After scouring their old website I still can't figure out where they were even located. I guess somewhere in the U.S.A. but even then all the info I have is circumstantial. In their lifetime none of the games they made were that popular. They never quite made it out of obscurity. A cursory search indicates their most successful game being "Surviving High School '07", a coming of age group of minigames. Alone was their only foray into horror games before their disappearance. It appears that in 2006, Vivendi Games purchased Centrescore, eventually bringing all their IPs under that Vivendi hood. Under the Vivendi hood they were dissolved and all of their games forgotten. Makes you wonder why Vivendi even wasted the money acquiring them.
This game was apparently released in November 2005 to various digital storefronts. Some claim it unreleased but there's at least one link that proves it was public and for sale. It was, at some point available for sale on EasyEdge, a now discontinued mobile phone service.
During the search for this game a lot of inconsistencies came up.
This game is known as a J2ME game, a simple web search will back me up. But looking at that EasyEdge page one can see none of the phones listed were actually J2ME phones. They all ran BREW, a whole separate system. For comparison it's like saying a games was made for the SNES but it was really a Genesis game. BREW was on some whole other thing.
Here's some links:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071106212646/http://easyedge.uscc.com/easyedge/GameDetail.do?1697 - EasyEdge page, confirms it was released.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090420025521/http://www.centerscore.com/index.htm - Centerscore's old page. More proof the game was released.
I ended up writing a full article about the history, attempts at recovery and link dump of all the places the game was mentioned. It's a damn shame too. J2ME horror is a super underrated genre and this looks like it would be a fun game. You can read the article here:
my website: https://charinusraps.neocities.org/pages/searchlight/alone
medium: https://medium.com/@charinusraps/the-horror-never-began-e99d873d19ba
substack: https://charinus.substack.com/p/the-horror-never-began
If anyone has any idea of where I could find this, or leads, people to contact, etc. Do get in contact with me. I feel this game has to exist somewhere still. Hopefully one day someone finds and posts it. I'd love to play it.
The game was indeed released. Centerscore was a small company of maybe 15 employees. They had an impressive game library considering their size. They were located in San Mateo, CA. I created the background tile sets and animations for Alone: The Horror Begins. There was another artist on the project who handled the menus, HUD elements, character portraits and some additional game elements. Some fun trivia, Andy Weir, who wrote the novel "The Martian", which became a movie starring Matt Damon, was an engineer at Centerscore.
Thanks for the information! You wouldn't happen to have a copy of the game would you (JAR or BAR files)? Or at least know if Alone was a BREW or J2ME game? Either way I'm going to update the article with this new information. It really seems like Centrescore had a lot of cool games, though nearly all of which of lost now.
I'm also going to reach out to Andy Weir and see if he somehow has a copy. Either way thanks for the tip.
And now that I know the game was actually released I'm way more confident it can be found!