Lost media

Lost media is a common term for media that existed at some point but either isn't currently available to the public or has been completely lost over time, often as a result of either a limited distribution of the original material or copyright disputes regarding its publication or sometimes just an outright loss of all available copies. Online searches and preservation efforts dedicated to this category of media have led to the term being popularized in the turn of the 2020s.

Being a franchise spanning four decades of content in just about every possible medium—much of it exclusive to different regions separated by linguistic barriers—it is inevitable that there's a staggering amount of lost Transformers media: thus, the content in this page is hardly comprehensive, and there's almost certainly more beyond what's listed here.

Lost Transformers media

Film

• "The Secret of Cybertron" was the first draft for what would eventually become 1986's The Transformers: The Movie, featuring a very different story compared to the finalized project. Flint Dille claims he might still own a copy of this script, but it has ultimately never been made public.
• The IMAX edition of Transformers (2007) features two minutes of additional footage. This footage has never been included in any of the many home video releases that the film has received throughout the years.

Cartoon

• "Dark Glass" was an unproduced episode of Beast Wars: Transformers. A complete script was allegedly written, but remains ultimately lost despite multiple fan attempts to get it published.
• "Primeval Dawn II" was a 10-minute motion comic that debuted at Wizard World Chicago in 2002. While a short introductory animation exists, the full episode has never been published online or distributed in any other medium since.

Video games

• Battle for the Allspark was a browser-based multiplayer game that went offline in 2009. No archive of its content remains.
• Battle for the Allspark v2 was also another browser-based multiplayer game that went offline sometime after 2009 and, much like its predecessor, it is also completely lost.
• Transformers Online (2012) was yet another multiplayer game that was shut down in 2012 and is currently unplayable.
• Transformers Universe was, yes, another multiplayer game that was shut down in 2014 and is currently unplayable.
• Transformers Online (2017) was—you won't believe it!—a multiplayer game that was shut down in 2017 and is currently unplayable.

Comics

• A BotBots comic book titled BotBots & The Cele Crew's Adventure was released exclusively in South Africa. Some pages have been recovered by fans but much of the comic remains lost.

Recovered Transformers media

Some cases of formerly lost Transformers media have since resulted in the recovery of such media, often through extensive fan efforts.

Animation

• A total of 16 animated shorts were produced during the first season Transformers Animated but only 14 of them were publicly released online. The remaining two, "Logo" and "Starscream's Fantasy", were screened druing BotCon 2009 and BotCon 2012, but otherwise never made available in any other format. It wasn't until 2022 when, after a sudden surge of interest and fan requests, Marty Isenberg allowed the two shorts to be published online unofficially.

Video games

• Transformers Battle Universe had been rendered unplayable since 2009, as a result of the online service it relied on had shutting down, but it was again restored into a playable state by fans in 2017.
• The Hoover Dam exterior level for the PC and home consoles version of Transformers The Game was long assumed to be lost, until it was successfully datamined from the Wii version during 2018 in a surprisingly complete state. A much more unfinished version of the level was also later discovered in the PS3 port.