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. The reasons for this can be the result of factors like limited distribution of the original material, copyright disputes regarding its publication, the shutdown of the service through which it was originally hosted, 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 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
- "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 and its sequel, Battle for the Allspark v2, were browser-based multiplayer games that went offline sometime around 2009. No archives of their content remains.
- Transformers Online (2012) was a Chinese MMORPG based on Transformers: Prime that was shut down after just six months and is currently unplayable.
- Transformers Universe was another Prime-based online game. Similar to Online, the game spent six months in open beta before being permanently shut down in January 2015.
- Transformers Online (2017) was an online team shooter based on Generation 1 and the live-action film series developed for the Chinese market. The game spent around 2 1/2 years in open beta before being shut down in February 2020, leaving it fully 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.
Audio
- The Operation Combination Telephone Audio Adventures were brief recorded messages available to Japanese fans in 1992, and have not subsequently been located.
Online content
- The Transformers Collectors Club Twitter feed was blanked in 2021, and with it went several bios of Club-exclusive toys.
Recovered Transformers media
Some formerly lost Transformers media has since been recovered or restored, often through extensive fan efforts.
Cartoon
- 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 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.
