By the time of the official release, this building was removed - it did not appear either in the 2001 demo or in the full version of the game (only a park with grass remained in the place of this palace). However, this building has been preserved on CD boxes in different countries - external and internal views. It was also preserved in the trailer for the updated demos. The existence of the building is also confirmed by the presence inside the game resources of a full version of several preserved and recognizable textures\models with the prefix "juwellier_...", as well as the preserved name of a remote location (Jewellery), which became a park in the game.
Information about the origin of this demo is very diverse, but there are no exact specifics; there are several versions:
1) This version is from some closed test for English-speaking countries, which later ended up in someone’s private collection
2) This version was sent by the developer to the US, UK or Ireland in advance, in 2000, where it was published in some collection (for example, "Top 100 Demos of 2000" or something similar), or released in a limited edition of disks one of the gaming magazines. Perhaps the developer subsequently changed his mind about publishing this demo widely and made an attempt to limit its distribution. If you carefully read gaming magazines with articles on The Sting! for 2000, you can see that Neo Production had big problems with deadlines - the release dates of the game were constantly postponed. As a result, this version was published on a limited number of CDs, was not particularly interesting due to a mission bug, and was completely forgotten after the full version in 2001.
3) The first publisher of The Sting! was planned to be not JoWood, but THQ. JoWood was only confirmed as publisher in December 2000. Perhaps Neo Production sent them some kind of promotional versions at the the end of 1999 or in 2000. This is logical - after all, any publisher has the right to know how the developer is doing. Perhaps THQ also conducted its own closed test of this version or published it to a limited extent in some collection or gaming magazine? Or - again, this version somehow ended up in a private collection.
4) There may be some combined variants of the origin of this version from those that I wrote above, or some completely different one.
I studied all the full and demo versions available in the public domain, and checked dozens of discs of gaming magazines from late 1999 to early 2001, published over 23 years. I read a lot of gaming magazines during the same time period. Perhaps some of the old retro gamers, game collectors and game hunting professionals will remember something similar.
Thank you for reading and I look forward and hope to your response, thanks.
