One of the most painful experiences of my life.

Thats how David Benioff once described seeing friends test-screen his and co-showrunner Dan Weiss original Game of Thrones pilot in 2010. After that viewing, more than 90 percent of the episode was supposedly reshot before it aired on HBO in April 2011, eventually leading to the phenomenon that the series is today.

But that first terrible, horrible, no good, very bad pilot called a piece of shit by the showrunners screenwriter friend Craig Mazin never saw the light of day. It became legend, something that could live only in Old Nans stories. Or so we thought.

Its an oft-forgotten fact that George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire novels serve as inspiration for Game of Thrones , has been depositing old copies of his writing to Texas A&Ms Cushing Memorial Library in College Station for more than two decades. He is said to have fallen in love with Cushings sci-fi collection and its archival system during visits to AggieCon as far back as the 1970s and decided to make the quiet spot in Texas a home for his massive catalog of original manuscripts.

The resulting collection at the library takes up multiple walls, the first of which is properly called the Wall. Its a collection so vast, itd make Samwell Tarlys head spin, staffed by a team of dedicated librarians and professors who serve as a kind of Nights Watch. Among the archives many files are manuscripts for the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, and as I learned during a trip to Texas over the summer a box containing a production draft of that painful Game of Thrones pilot.

An early version of the pilot script supposedly surfaced online years ago, but the scripts authenticity was never officially verified. No one seemed to know how similar it was to the rejected pilot that HBO shot or how much it differed; scripts often go through various rewrites, so the mysterious version floating around online could have been from any phase of revisions.

I had three days to spend in Texas, but it took only five minutes to realize the script online and the one at Cushing are different. There are reasons to believe that the version in Texas is similar to the pilot script that HBO shot: The production draft at Cushing is dated Oct. 22, 2009, right around the time the unaired pilot started filming . The Cushing script credits the unaired pilots original director, Tom McCarthy, who was later replaced in reshoots by Tim Van Patten. Plus, in terms of content, the Cushing script contains storylines that have been rumored to be in the unaired pilot script (as well get into below) key story departures, dialogue alterations and location changes that cast the Seven Kingdoms in a different light.

Game of Thrones isnt returning until April 2019 , but fans are already bracing for a final season full of callbacks to early moments in the show, which will complete its eight-year massive jigsaw puzzle , as it was described by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister.

In advance of the season premiere, we exhaustively rummage through the secrets hidden in the pilot script from Martins collection, involving everything from an unreleased Cersei Lannister moment to a really drunk Jon Snow making a scene. Heres what Westeros might have looked like if that piece of shit pilot had aired:

The Cersei scene that might ruffle some feathers