They might have intended to include the promotional trailer that had been used on Official US PlayStation Magazine Issue 43 a couple months earlier. To my knowledge there was never a promotional interactive demo for Twisted Metal: Black released on any demo discs, but it would be interesting if there had been plans for one that never came to fruition.

Nice find !

I dug into Jampack Summer 2001 looking for TMB-related strings in notable files:

• \SCE_DD\SCE_DD.ELF: Demo disc's menu ELF file
  
  • "Twisted Metal:\nBlack™"
  • "cdrom0:\SCE_DD\MOVIES\TMBLACK.PSS;1" (tied to some unused logic)
• \SCE_DD\DATA\MENU.FF: Supporting archive file
  
  • Contains strings for demo ELF labels/locations and intermediary controls pages. TMB isn't among them.

PSS files are PS2 FMVs, so that menu item would've been for a TMB-related video. Despite having plenty of spare space, that Jampack disc doesn't contain a "TMBLACK.PSS" file.

I figured that maybe another North American demo disc from around that time might contain that PSS file. Like another PlayStation Underground magazine/KIOSK/Jampack/etc demo disc or the standalone TMB demo disc.

Expected it to just be TMB's making of documentary or maybe the TMB trailer in a best-case scenario.

Here are the locations of the documentary on the demo discs that have it:

• PlayStation Underground 5.1: \SCE_DD\MOVIES\TMB.PSS
• Twisted Metal: Black demo disc: \TMBLACK\MOV\INTERVU.PSS (same documentary but in worse quality, with the top/bottom cropped-out and with more generic-looking overlays)

At some point while browsing through PSU 5.1's menus, I noticed these in the bulletins section:




That was... interesting. From what I could tell, PlayStation Underground 4.4 was never advertised as including anything related to TMB. None of the online listings or YouTube videos I found of it contained any mention of TMB being a part of it.

Didn't know what exactly it'd be (demo? video? documentary?) and wasn't initially able to get the button code working.

When I dug into its files, I stumbled upon \SCE_DD\MOVIES\TMBLACK.PSS. It turned out to be a high quality, direct-feed version of the TMB trailer. IMO that's quite a find. AFAIK the only direct feed versions of that trailer that were previously out there ran at 15fps at a resolution of 320x240 using a very low bitrate. IGN's off-camera footage of the trailer from October 2, 2000 (which has a placeholder TMB logo) ran at 30fps at a similar low resolution/bitrate. As much as I love the trailer, all those versions of it looked and sounded terrible.

TMBLACK.PSS runs at 60fps interlaced in decent quality. Its resolution is 720x480 and its metadata falsely claims that its aspect ratio is 4:3. The video is windowboxed. The trailer itself is 640x448 (TMB's native in-game resolution) and is surrounded by big black borders on all sides. Sound quality is decent too. It was last modified on November 28, 2000 and doesn't use a placeholder TMB logo.

The PSS file was probably derived from a tape source. Line flickering is apparent at the start of the video and colour bleeding can be seen around HUD elements (i.e. green radar arrows, health bars and yellow text).

Later on I was able to get the button code working in PSU 4.4. Turns out that after pressing X to enter the arcade menu, you need to quickly press left on the d-pad at the beginning of the slow menu transition animation. If it succeeds, the camera will pan left to a separate menu page for the TMB trailer:



Here's a high quality version of the video I uploaded to YouTube (watch it in 4K 60fps):


I used the PSS file as a baseline, ran it through QTGMC to deinterlace it/reduce line flickering, cropped-out the black borders to get a 640x448 image and upscaled the result to 2880x2160 (4K in a 4:3 aspect ratio). More encoding details can be found in the video's description.


Randomhero1 wrote on 03/30/19 at 08:44:21:

That video is officially present in PlayStation Underground 5.1. Both of Silent Scope's cool moves can be accessed from its menu.

Kind of weird that they excluded it in the Jampack given that it was on-disc. I didn't see any references to it in either \SCE_DD\SCE_DD.ELF nor \SCE_DD\DATA\MENU.FF. So it doesn't appear to have been intended to be an Easter egg in that Jampack.

Manta Ray wrote on 05/13/19 at 01:21:18:


No, and I went back and still didn't see Warhawk.  What second of the video are you referring to?

Also, yeah, it looks kind of like Tooth is flying, but if you look closer it looks more like he's driving on top of the plane or some not finished structure that was later removed.

Maybe he is though. Hard to know.

Manta Ray wrote on 05/14/19 at 00:38:24:


Maybe. Except it does appear to be carrying an item pickup, and Roadkill's one hit appears to destroy it. It does seem higher.

It's possible they used the model at first and then reduced it in size or created a new one for the random choppers.