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.

Online content

• While many videos on SectorSeven.org (the main website for the Sector Seven ARG) have been reposted elsewhere, the website itself has since gone offline and with it a large portion of its content. The landing page can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine, but only its first revealed password ('takara83') seems to work.

Audio

• The Operation Combination Telephone Audio Adventures were brief recorded messages available to Japanese fans in 1992, and have not subsequently been located.
• While the first 38 episodes of the Kiss Players radio drama were collected and released on CD, episodes 39–51 have remained unavailable since their original broadcast in 2007.

Recovered Transformers media

Some formerly lost Transformers media has since been recovered or restored, often through extensive fan efforts.

Cartoon

• The fourth episode of the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon, "Spychangers to the Rescue", originally aired on American television mere days after the September 11 terrorist attack. Due to increased sensitivities brought about by said attack, the episode had to be temporally removed from broadcast rotation and re-edited to change the episode's subject from the potential danger of an energy generator exploding to said generator cracking open and releasing a corrosive gas instead. Additionally, certain scenes of battle and panic from the original broadcast version were also removed for the later rebroadcast version. When the series released on DVD in the United Kingdom, it was the later rebroadcast edit of the episode that was included, while the original broadcast edit has never seen official release. For over a decade, the original edit of the episode was considered lost until a VHS recording of it was uploaded to YouTube on November 15, 2013.
• 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 during 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.