Weird Stuff (which is undocumented as far as I know)

Mirror's Edge (2009)

Fallout: New Vegas (2010)

E3 2010 Trailer

Minecraft (Beta, 2011)

Minecraft was (is?) a disappointment held together with duct tape and chewing gum. The game is horribly inefficient, buggy, poorly designed, and EXTREMELY complex if trying to create an independent reimplementation. Over the years, it started suffering from feature creep, probably to continue attracting people that like novelty.

If you want a similar game but with a net protocol that's easier to play and tinker with, check out ClassiCube.

ClassiCube, an extended reimplementation of Minecraft Classic.

Minecraft Classic network protocol

java.io.DataInput's "Modified UTF-8", which is UTF-16 (including its weird surrogates) encoded as UTF-8, except for ASCII NUL, which is represented as C0 80.

Spore (2008)

A lot of this game gives me 'lost/had to rewrite ⅔ of the source tree' vibes. The procedural planets, metaball-based creature models, and usage of MS Trebuchet in the UI seem to be the only similarities between what Will Wright showed off at GDC 2005 and what was released on store shelves.

Will Wright apparently prototyped an actual evolution simulator but later went with letting the player influence their creature directly so the player wouldn't be bored just staring at the creatures doing things on their own. Why Maxis still went with the idea of marketing it as a tool for teaching evolution rather than a sandbox god game like most other games of its kind is beyond me.

Spore's extreme scope in design and constant nagging from EA executives doomed it to being a long-delayed disappointment. Since Maxis was shut down (it technically still exists, but the new one is only related by name and exists exclusively to support The Sims 4), it is possible the Spore source tree was deleted and is gone forever.

On the extremely off-chance the source tree does ever see the light of day, I hope whoever makes it public also includes the CVS/SVN/Perforce metadata so we can see the full development history and possibly even get a build of the GDC '05-era source into a fully-functional state. RenderWare is the primary obstacle in the way of any kind of legal source publication.

Early Trailers

GDC '05 Presentation

2007 IGN Demo