Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill is an unreleased video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. It stars Socks, the pet cat of 42nd US President Bill Clinton and his family, in a platforming adventure in which he has to make his way past spies, crooked politicians and the media to warn the White House of a stolen nuclear missile. Scheduled for a release in the Fall of 1993, the game was complete and ready to be shipped to retailers, but was suddenly cancelled following the closing of publisher Kaneko’s US branch.
It has been speculated that its subliminal political themes may have also had a hand in its demise. The game’s bosses were made out to be caricatures of former Republican leaders such as Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush. Also, Nintendo’s own censorship policies during the late 1980s and early 1990s condemned games that had “subliminal political messages” or “overt political statements”. As well, it is assumed that it is unlikely that Sega would had allowed such content into the game.
In a pre-release review of the game, Nintendo Power openly questioned the reason that such figures were in the game, and deemed the title as politically controversial. This, coupled with the fact that Kaneko’s US branch was closing down, prevented Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill from ever being shipped, and no known ROM has been found on the Internet. – [info from Wikipedia]
Thanks to MathUser and DDobson from www.gamingafter40.com for some of these scans!
Images:
Videos:
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(9 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Since I see you are paying attention to responces, feel free to upload this advertisement for the game:
http://i483.photobucket.com/albums/rr196/MathUser/1993%20Magazine%20Scans/GamePro_Issue_051_October_1993_007.jpg
Thank you MathUser, i’m going to add that ASAP :)
So ASAP is when?
ASAP as.. right now! Ops, yeah, i just forgot to add this to the today update, but now they are in there :) Thank you MathUser! And sorry for the delay as always ;D
I remember playing this game at CES. Too bad I never got the chance to play it at home–it was interesting.
If there was a playable version at CES, maybe in the future some collector will release it.. we can hope :P
You can chance to play when the owner started to give away reproduction carts or a ROM is leaked online.
Somewhere in the internet, a prto exists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McDVmiYFdKw
I worked at Kaneko USA’s Advertising agency for the years that they developed that game as well as some others. Chester Cheetah, Fido Dido, Deadly (Power) Moves and some others that never saw the light of day… The Soda Pop Kid comes to mind. I was the artist for the package cover for Socks and designed the sell sheet shown and the game packages for Sega and Nintendo releases. I still have the final illustration and design cover alternates that were rejected. I remember seeing a vhs tape back then that we were given to use as reference for the promotional materials. Yes, there was a playable version of the game at the Consumer Electronics Show that year.
Thanks a lot for your comment Scott, it’s always interesting to read this kind of info from who worked on lost games :) If you can share those rejected covers, we’ll be happy to preserve them in the U64 archive!
I found a sceenshot.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2q0q5ua&s=5#.VLwP-i4YFDo
Thanks a lot for all these new screens RGF9000 i will add them all ASAP :)
It’s back….
http://cliqist.com/2016/03/30/infamously-unreleased-socks-cat-game-based-clinton-pet-coming-kickstarter/
Or at least it will be once the Kickstarter takes off.
After I initially left a comment I seem to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on whenever a
comment is added I get four emals with the exact same
comment. Perhaps there is an easy method you can remove me from
that service? Thank you!
Now that it was released back on February 1st of this year, don’t you think it’s time to update this page?
There are many old articles on Unseen64 that still wait to be updated, unfortunately at the moment i’m working on the site almost alone by myself, so it’s already hard to keep up with new articles and researches :( I hope one day I could be able to update old pages too