Rare Burnout 3 Xbox ‘Beta 3’ Disc From July 2004 Finally Gets Dumped

Game preservationist MattKC spotted an undocumented original Xbox copy of Burnout 3 on eBay this summer and paid a steep price to have it shipped from Australia. Printed on the face is July 28, 2004, the words Beta 3, and a warning that reads Confidential material: return to mastering lab. A name on the label, blurred in the video for privacy, belonged to a product manager at EA Australia, which fits the moment Electronic Arts bought Criterion and took the series in-house. How the disc left that office and landed on a public auction remains a guess.

Retail Xbox games normally put their data under a DVD-Video wrapper to prevent a PC drive from accessing them after a brief warning, but this DVD-R disk was an exception. It was a purple-tinted consumer DVD-R that had been used for a development kit. So, when connected to a normal drive and ran through DiscImageCreator, it produced a clean 3.7 GB image in just a few minutes. XDVDMulleter then unpacked the data, and after a bit of a tussle, the build was booted up by the emulator Xemu. There was no program database file on the disk, which would have been extremely unlikely for a late master.

Running a hash check on all the files against a PAL retail dump revealed eight changes, one of which was the main executable. Signing accounts for a portion of the difference. Criterion had created this particular copy as a debug binary for a development console rather than a retail-signed XBE for a store disk. The English in-game play appears almost identical to the finalized game. However, changing the language triggered the appearance of a few strings that had been written to run too long for the UI. The retail version of the game just condensed those sentences. References to a generic server for online play were replaced with an EA server in later files. You also lose Xbox Live and Insignia hosting Burnout 3, as those strings would never appear in a live session anyhow.

Crash mode contains the most significant code modification discovered by MattKC. After getting some considerable air in a wreck, the beta simply outputs out the height using a standard sprintf function and one decimal point. A few European languages, however, use a comma to mark that point, so the retail executable includes a bespoke formatter to ensure that local punctuation is respected. That’s about the extent of the differences; no leftover cars, no cut tracks, and no debug menu sticking about in the menus. Criterion had evidently finished the US executable about an hour before this disk was released, and the European one approximately 6 days later, which explains why the remaining work appears to be copy fitting rather than any meaningful new features.

MattKC thought this buy was a poor source of hidden material but an excellent shelf piece. He did, however, submit the ISO to the Internet Archive as Burnout 3: Takedown, Xbox Beta 3, 07/28/2004, so that anyone can look without having to search for another one of those burned DVD-Rs. For a game so close to being ready for release, the archive is the real treasure. You now have a late PAL localization pass out in the open, dated and hashed, which is more than most corporate disks receive even after 22 years.
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