RAREware

Timber 64 (Rare) [Nintendo 64 – Cancelled]

Timber 64 is a cancelled 3D platform game that was rumored to be in development by Rare for the Nintendo 64, but it’s existence was kinda unclear even by reading interviews with former rare developers (and some fans consider it an urban legend). When asked about Timber 64 some of them don’t remember such a game ever being in development at the time, but others even describe a Timber 64 prototype demo they created. This contradiction between ex-RareWare employees may have been caused by how the studio was organized during the N64 era. Different Rare teams worked secretly in their own office, without knowing what the other teams were doing at the same time.

As we can read on Nintendo Life:

“Rare was famously secretive,” Steve Mayles recalls, “and that included other games being made in the company. Many people on the team wouldn’t have seen much (if anything) of DK64 and Conker.”

“Rare’s practice of separating teams across its infamous ‘barns’ naturally created some competition. “I’m not really sure we thought about that at the time,” remembers lead environment artist Steven Hurst. “In those days each team worked in relative isolation and competed against each other to develop the ‘best’ games – a healthy rivalry if you like. I do remember actually that we changed BK to be more of a ‘proper’ 3D game (similar to Mario 64) after seeing the work that the Conker team were doing.”

As you probably know Timber the Tiger was later seen in another Rare game: it’s one of the playabler racers in Diddy Kong Racing. Originally Timber was meant to be the main protagonist of the game, when it was not using the Donkey Kong IP.

As we can read from an interview by NotEnoughShaders with Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave:

NES: There was a rumor that Timber 64 was a game Rare was developing during the N64 days. Basically, the rumor was that Timber from Diddy Kong Racing would get his own game just like Banjo and Conker did. Pipsy and Bumper would co-star in Timber 64. Can you or Lee provide any details on this rumor? It’s interesting because Diddy Kong Racing takes place on Timber Island so it seemed that Rare really liked the Timber character.

Martin Wakeley: I couldn’t say for definite but I have no recollection of that ever being in development. Where the rumour may have started is that an early version of DKR (I think it was called RC Pro Am at the time) had Timber as the lead character. I’m sure I’ve got a badly fitting Nylon polo shirt with the game logo on it somewhere.

Lee Musgrave: There was never a Timber 64 game. Yes, there was Pro-Am64 that had Timber as the main character, but that became Diddy Kong Racing and that was the end of that.”

In february 2021 Kev Bayliss wrote on VGC:

“After finishing work on Diddy Kong Racing in 1998, I started work on a project that was to become a 3D adventure game based in a fantasy style world, similar to that of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but in a prehistoric environment.

The main character was originally going to be – believe it or not – Timber, the cute tiger from Diddy Kong Racing. That’s because he was intended to be the star of the previous year’s racing game, when it was originally known as R.C. Pro-Am 64.”

“In Dinosaur Planet, Timber was going to be a ‘time-travelling tiger’ with a rucksack, little fingerless gloves, a baseball cap and a small dinosaur for a sidekick.

Actually, I even tried out Timber in a project prior to DKR, where he walked around on all fours like a real tiger cub. It was an early 3D platforming test and I wanted him to use his claws to scale walls. But this project was abandoned and so he was moved into DKR and that’s as far as his career went!

Now, if only somebody could dig up that really old demo with Timber in his rucksack…”

In the end not only Timber 64 was once a real concept in development at Rare, but it was kinda real for 2 different projects: there was a first Timber 64 3D platformer (then cancelled to create RC Pro Am 64 / DKR) and later a different Timber 64 3D action adventure (which later became Dinosaur Planet / Starfox Adventure).

These two Timber games for Nintendo 64 could have been mentioned to someone in the gaming press, and the rumors started circulating. As written by Bayliss, now we just have to wait for someone to find footage or even a playable version of those Timber 64 demos. 

Jonny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada (Rare) [PC – Cancelled]

Jonny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada is a cancelled point & click adventure game similar to Monkey Island that was in development by Rare for PC / Mac in the early ‘90s, before the team fully started working on Donkey Kong Country for Nintendo. The Kremlings, a race of anthropomorphic crocodilians that appear in the DK franchise, were originally conceived for this lost game and only later reused for DKC, becoming canon in the Donkey Kong world.

Gregg Mayles – Creative director at Rare and designer for the Battletoads and Donkey Kong Country series – is quite a fan of the piracy world and lore. Jonny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada was conceived as a game to fulfill his love for pirates and it would have been set in a series of islands with coconut palms, galleons and hidden treasures. This same tropical setting planned for Jonny Blastoff was later reused for Donkey Kong Country.

While Rare never officially announced this game to the public and no image from the prototype was ever released, in September 2015 Gregg shared some concept art on Twitter, showing off the original Kremlings designs that somehow resemble the Battletoads characters designs.

While no details about Jonny Blastoff’s gameplay were ever revealed we can imagine it would have been played like a traditional point & click adventure game, with many strange characters to interact with, items to retrieve, weird puzzles to resolve and Rare’s classic english humor.

After Donkey Kong Country Gregg Mayles and Rare worked on other piracy-inspired games such as the cancelled Project Dream for SNES (later Banjo & Kazooie for N64) and lately Sea of Thieves for Xbox One. 

Ordinary Joe (Rare Ltd) [Prototype – Xbox 360]

Ordinary Joe is a cancelled prototype for a new survival horror game, that was in early development for Xbox 360 at Rare LTD, designed by Chris Seavor. There are basically  no info about this project, apart from a short interview with Chris at  Rare FanDaBase:

As for projects finished or otherwise, well first there was Killer Instinct (called Brute Force for a time).. then Killer 2, Killer Gold, Twelve Tales, Bad Fur Day, Other Bad Day, Arc Angel, Getting Medieval, Urchin (really regret not pushing harder on this one), PD Core, and a small team prototype my last job as a designer called Ordinary Joe which despite the innocuous name was my take on the survival horror genre (nothing to do with Jo Dark) .

Also, in another interview at Eurogamer:

Chris Seavor: Yeah. We did some tech for it. It was all right. It was okay. But I knew at that point I was never going to get a team to finish this, so it was just a matter of time. I only worked on it for three or four months, and there were three of us in a corner with a big sign saying, keep out. I really enjoyed that period because we were just being really creative. Even though no-one else could give a s**t, we were being really creative and doing some really good stuff. It’s a pity no-one really seemed that bothered, certainly Microsoft, who were only interested in Banjo. That was fair enough I guess.

We hope that in the future someone that worked on this Ordinary Joe prototype could share some images or videos, to preserve the existence of the project. 

Arc Angel (Rare Ltd) [Xbox – Prototype]

Arc Angel is a cancelled futuristic racing game prototype that was in development in 2003 for the Xbox, by a team lead by Chris Seavor at Rare LTD. There are just a few info about this lost project as a nice article at Pure Rarity:

Chris said that for the record Conker 2 was never scrapped; he just didn’t want to do it at the time and that was how Arc Angel was conceived. A nice easy racing game, or so he thought. During the four months he headed it a fair amount of design was nailed down but it eventually proved to be too ambitious. Also, some team members left the company or moved to other projects leaving Arc Angel with a lack of resources. Eventually the game was cancelled and Chris was put on Quest as lead artist.

Some more info can be read in another article from the same site:

He told me Seavor was initially on Conker 2 but then moved onto a racing project which was cancelled. Supposedly he is now on something MMORPG. This was some really interesting stuff but I wanted to find out more about it so I asked Tony Wong as well. He hadn’t heard about the racer but confirmed that the Conker team has been disbanded. As for the MMORPG, he said he couldn’t comment on it since it was not official.

I remembered a post in the FatBabies forums about Nintendo cancelling a futuristic racer and asked Martin if this was the same game. He told me it was the Rare management — not Nintendo — that had cancelled it and that it probably was futuristic. He explained that Nintendo always leave people alone if they produce good work.

Sadly there are no preserved images or videos about Arc Angel. If you know someone that worked on this prototype, please let  us know! We would love to save some screens in the archive. 

Killer Instinct 2 [SNES – Cancelled]

Killer Instinct 2 is a fighting game developed by Rare, licensed by Nintendo and manufactured by Midway in 1996.  A modified version of KI2 appeared on the Nintendo 64 as Killer Instinct: Gold, but a SNES version of KI2 was also developed and completed but never released. [Info from Wikipedia]

As noticed by Molasar:

On twitter in 2015 Tim Stamper shared a photo of his old gaming stuff with a KI2 SNES development cart pcb on it.

Post by Justin Fowler

Videos (from the arcade version):