I've never seen this before, and it's pretty fascinating. With the footage from this trailer (which is painful to watch because it's a screen captured on video in the 90s; sorry about that) we see that this version of the game IS after development was rebooted with Claire replacing Elza, with environments from the release version of Resident Evil 2, but the trailer also uses RE1.5 environments and backgrounds, including some stuff I've never seen before. Some zombie models from the released RE2 are here, but it looks like there are some yet-to-be replaced animations on them, and there's some 1.5 zombies as well. The weapon models are also completely different from RE2 as we know it, with Leon and Claire wielding much more complicated looking, bulkier guns (Claire looks like she has some sort of full on LMG or AR, while Leon seems to have a magazine fed shotgun like an AA12). Leon's model also looks different from the released RE2, with some different animations. There's also an older version of the Licker intro scene in this trailer, where a police officer's head is dropped to the floor when the player approached the blood puddle in the hallway, and then the licker drops immediately without the game cutting to an FMV sequence. I feel like I've heard of this beta-version of the Licker scene but have never seen it personally.
The most exciting part of the footage though is that it looks like the man-spider hybrid creature from RE1.5 was in some capacity carried over to RE2 since this footage features it in a final RE2 lab hallway (using the same trick that the Lickers would use in that hallway instead). It looks like a bigger, bulkier, almost Tyrant-like version of the Chimera enemies from Resident Evil 1, and it's a shame this baddie didn't make it into the final version.
Anyway, I have no idea how widely known or seen this strange in-between version of Resident Evil 2 is, but I thought it might be pretty cool to share.
