Nintendo

Kid Icarus Uprising [Beta – 3DS]

Kid Icarus Uprising is an action game developed by Project Sora and published by Nintendo on its 3DS system in 2012. It marked the first entry in the Kid Icarus series in over 20 years; with the last being Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters on the Game Boy.

In the great gulf of time between Uprising & its portable predecessor, the rumour mill was rife with talk of more possible installments. Take, for example, this scan from a 90’s video game magazine, which suggested an SNES game was in the works:

kid icarus snes

In 2008, Factor 5, Inc. developed a prototype for a new Wii Kid Icarus, as per Nintendo’s request. Ultimately, however, their dreams of developing a full title were shot down when the publisher chose not to proceed, before the studio later went out of business in December that year.

As Factor 5 fell, Kid Icarus: Uprising began to take shape at Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ in late 2008. An early prototype was devised by Masahiro Sakurai and a small team of handpicked for the task. Originally, Sakurai had set out to create a Star Fox game for Wii, but ran into issues with the limited manuverability of controlling vehicles, which was preventing him from moulding the experience he had envisioned. He was aspiring to develop a gameplay system in which the player could turn instantly on a dime to return fire, or dodge projectiles. By turning his creation into a Kid Icarus game, the director overcame these difficulties, as he explained to Official Nintendo Magazine in June 2010:

“…the problem with Starfox was that-and you’ll see this when you see the trailer for Kid Icarus – is that the game design incorporates a lot of different views. For example, flying and shooting sideways or turning around and shooting behind and I felt that there were some restrictions with Starfox in this regard. With Pit, there is a certain amount of flexibility that is allowed and makes a better fit for this gameplay.”

As Sakurai elaborated on in his Iwata Asks interview on the subject of Uprising, when development began, it was being prototyped and demoed on PC; as well as Wii at one stage:

Iwata:

Yes. Development did last a long time.
Sakurai:

At first we didn’t have the Nintendo 3DS development kit, so we started making it on a PC. Oh, and for a while we were using a Wii to make it! (laughs)

The interview also disclosed two previously unseen prototypes from early in the game’s life cycle:

At E3 2010, Kid Icarus: Uprising had its premiere, debuting as the first ever Nintendo 3DS game to be shown to the world. Upon analysis, we can observe a number of differences between it and the final build:

The above video documents the title in an evidently early state with incomplete, lower quality graphics than the released game. At the time the trailer was created, Troy Lund was originally slated to portray the protagonist, Pit, in the English language dub. Eventually, he was replaced by Anthony Del Rio, who plays the character in the English voiceover of the final game. This trailer demonstrates Lund’s version of the character, prior to his recasting.

We can glean also that this build contained a different aiming reticule. Whereas the release build adopted a circular design, which changes based upon the power of your shot, the one seen here is more static and simplistic.

kid icarus urpsing beta

Beta

kid icarus uprising final

Final 

Prototype/beta Images:

  

Super Off Road [Beta – SNES]

Update: the Magazine says Ultra 64 but those captures are from Super Off Road: The Baja for Super Nintendo from Software Creations

Williams Entertainment was one of the first third-party to show support for Nintendo 64 even before the console had that final name and specifications. In fact they showed at E3 ’95 two tech demo, one was No Fear Racing while the other was an off road racing game tentatively called Off Road. It’s very likely that this early demo was the base for the N64 racer Off Road Challenge.

Images taken from Cd Consoles issue 4

Images: 

Super Turrican [Beta – SNES]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Super Turrican was developed by Factor 5 and published by Seika for the Super Nintendo. Factor 5’s Super Turrican plays similarly to Mega Turrican and shares a similar visual style, but the game has a different set of levels and features a freeze beam in place of the original lightning whip. DEC noticed some reference about the beta version of Super Turrican on the Factor 5 web site (http://www.factor5.de/secrets_super_turrican.shtml) and several other web site relay this information when the already known version was planned to the Wii virtual console. 

Iridion [GBC – Cancelled]

Shin’en Multimedia was founded in 1999 by coders from the Amiga demoscene.
Manfred Linzner, one of the founders, always had the desire to develop an horizontal shoot-em-up for the beloved Amiga computer but after just programming one stage the project was abandoned.
When the Munich based developer decided to focus to the Game Boy Color the idea of creating a shooter was still alive and they started work on it.
According to developer, Iridion was a horizontally scrolling shooter that pushed the Game Boy Color’s hardware to the maximum with never-before-seen (on the Game Boy) graphical effects.
With the help of its proprietary graphics, coding and music tools, Shin’en was promising some impressive technical feats, like 128 colors simultaneously on screen, smooth two-way parallax scrolling, multi-color overlay-sprites, 3D-rendered animation sequences and more elaborate music pieces than most other Game Boy titles.
The game was planned to have 8 stages, 9 bosses and 12 weapons to dispose the enemies with.
Anyway, after just an excellent one level demo, Shin’en, recognizing that original GBC games were almost impossible to market, dropped this project as well.

When Shin’en shifted their focus to the Game Boy Advance, Iridion was their first game to appear on the “new” system.
Iridion 3D was then released in 2001 for the GBA with commercial success and thus began Shin’en technical excellency on Nintendo platforms that continues to this days with the recently released Nano Assault for Nintendo 3DS.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

Images (GBC version):

Video from the final GBA version:

 

Jackal [Wii – Prototype]

In 2009, images about an undisclosed project for Wii appeared on 3d artist Eric Testroete’ site. The pictures resemble very closely a 3d rendition of Konami old military game Jackal released in 1986 in the arcades. In light of Konami revival of its older franchises on Wii under the Rebirth brand-name ( Contra, Castlevania, Gradius ) a new Jackal could have been in the card. Too bad it seems the project never went further than that working prototype.

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