I first got AOM when I was 4-5, probably around 2004-2005 ish. It was in the UK. I remember I had a version of the game before I got the Titans expansion. I remember it was the version of the game with an invisible unit bug. Anyway, I remember my father and older brother playing the game, and I remember a cutscene, it looked very weird, not like the main game. It was NOT the bootup cutscene where you see a huge battle between soldiers and monsters, it was NOT any cutscene I remember being the campaign anywhere or in the tutorial. In this cut scene, I’m pretty sure I saw what looked like a cyclops fighting a bunch of swordsmen, next to a temple. The cyclops picked one of them up and threw him, and I remember he decayed much slower than normal units after he died, and I swear I saw a skeleton too. (after he decayed, like in AOE 2) I remember the temple looked weird, not like the temples in the main game. The cyclops and units also looked different from the main game.
I never found out what the heck this was. I recently looked online and found out the alpha units looked different, as were some of the animations. The temple looked a bit like the alpha temple, but the other units not so much. I recently saw in the AOM credits, towards the end, Age of Mythology Credits - YouTube at about the 5:10 mark, what looks like some kind of version of the game in development. You can see they have some Age of Empires 2 icons there. If anything, this cutscene I saw kind of looked a bit like AOE 2, and a bit like this weird picture you can see in the credits.
If anyone has got any information about the very early development of the game, please let me know, or if you also remember this. I have no idea how my father and brother found this cutscene, it could’ve been on the first bootup of the game, or somewhere online.
Any information can help.