Before then, we had received the Twin CD release of the Sega Smash Packs... which included Sega Swirl. In 2005, I was in my sister's room on her computer [called The 7th PC... even then!], and was messing with the Sega Smash Pack Collection CD. The PC ran Windows 98 First Edition, had 64MB of RAM, had 400MHz CPU speed (Intel Pentium II), had an S3 Trio 64V+ PCI video card, and a Sound Blaster ISA sound card. In 2005. Anyway, in the process of messing with the Smash Packs, including playing Sonic 2, Phantasy Star II (which I sucked at back then), and Comix Zone (I STILL suck at that game), all in short intervals... I finally went to run Super Shinobi. I knew about this game on the Internet and heard it was good (for its time at least), so I started the game. My sis was watching me the whole time, so this was already interesting from the start.
The game starts up, and I watched the short intro. Since I never played the game ever, I had no clue of the final product. After pressing start, I immediately noticed the numbers in the top-right corner... and so did Sis. Our first and quick deduction was the Level Select feature... which I knew wasn't present in the final. Went into the options menu, and immediately noticed the No Death feature. Clearly not a final product feature. Oh, and the numbered sound test. [Somehow I recalled the named tracks?] Yet, I never thought it to be a beta. Not that I could play it far enough on The 7th PC to even determine that before it crashed (program kept closing without any warning) within a minute. Yes, it was that unstable on 7th.
A few years later, in 2007, I noticed that the games themselves were in the .kvq extension and even with my inferior software skills, I could tell that they were encrypted. I copied the files to another location, which would be anywhere right now since I keep switching backup drives and moving stuff, and left it alone. Since there was no info other than what the extension itself was at the time, it was pointless.
Fast-forward to Saturday, August 13, 2011. I was going through drx's Hidden Palace forums, since his main website is bugged up [PHP fail], and found the first thread linked below. I then read the entire thread and thought to myself, "Wait. Does that mean the ROM file is finally decrypted into a playable version?" A [now dead] link proved as such. When I found out that the link was dead, I was disappointed, but I did not give up! I looked through the directory of which the ROM was previously stored. It was not present on the server. I also knew that it was not floating on the Internet on another source, so I went on to reading the SonicRetro forum thread linked in the Hidden Palace forum thread, which is the second link... right under the first thread link.
Upon reading the SonicRetro thread, someone had the foresight of placing the Revenge of Shinobi beta ROM with the rest of the games [of course], thus not losing the file at all... and prompting me to save the files and host them right on this website. Don't expect a comparison screenshot collection or any video anytime soon, as I suck at the final version of Revenge of Shinobi to begin with.