Wildwaters (Extreme Kayak) [N64 – Cancelled]

Wildwaters (Extreme Kayak) [N64 – Cancelled]

Wildwaters (also know as “Extreme Kayak” and “X-Stream”) is a cancelled racing game that was in development by Looking Glass Studios for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 / 1999. The project was announced at E3 1999 by Ubisoft (that was interested as a publisher) while the studio was working on Destruction Derby 64 (published in the same year), but sadly it was never finished.

Wildwaters 64 was very promising as Looking Glass were able to create an engine with real physics running for the waterflow through the river on an N64, but it needed more time and love which eventually ran out. Five different gameplay modes, including Arcade, Time Trial, Championship, Finals and Versus Battle were planned for the game.

Some months later, on May 2000, Looking Glass Studios went out of business during a financial crisis related to their publisher at the time, Eidos Interactive. Wildwaters / Extreme Kayak vanished forever, along with their other promising N64 racing game, Mini Racers.

There was another cancelled water racing game titled “Wild Water World Championships” that was planned for the Nintendo 64, but it should not be confused with this one as WWWC was developed by Promethean Designs.

Thanks a lot to Les Betterley for the help in preserving some images from this lost project!

Images (in-game):

Images (models):

Videos:


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monokoma




10 thoughts on “Wildwaters (Extreme Kayak) [N64 – Cancelled]

  1. Celine

    The game, which is also know under its working title, X-Stream, is being developed by Nintendo 64 newcomer Looking Glass (formerly known as Intermetrics) and hit the console as early as Q4 1999.

  2. monokoma Post author

    Agh… i dont know why, but i was sure that Wild Waters was developed by another team! You are right, they are the same game :P mmh now i need to merge these 2 articles into one..

  3. Gilgamesh

    Hi there xxx! Yes I remember talking to you about WildWaters a while ago.

    Yep, these look like the exact models that Les Betterley made back in the late 90’s at Looking Glass Studios for the N64 WildWaters game. I remember doing the face maps for these. It was the first time I’d ever done it, and I was really nervous. ^_^

    Super neat! I haven’t seen these in a long time. Where’d you find these? I wonder if it’s going to be released as retroware under a different name?

    Thanks for the note. All of my pre-prod stuff like this was lost in a harddrive crash years ago. Seeing stuff like this again sure brings back memories. ^_^

    – Dan

    On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 6:50 AM

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