River Raid [SNES – Cancelled]

River Raid [SNES – Cancelled]

River Raid: The Mission of No Return (aka River Raid 3) is a cancelled shoot ’em up for the Super Nintendo, based on the original River Raid released in 1982 by Activision for the Atari 2600. The game was going to be published by Activision but it was later cancelled and only few screens remain preserved in the gallery below. Celine was able to find some of these images in Banzzai magazine #14 and Super Power #13.

The source code of River Raid SNES was found in 2001 by an user of the Atari Age forum:

I can tell you, that what I have of River Raid SNES, is mainly a source code dump from August of ’93. You’d have to recompile it in order to view it. I had one of my programmers do so just we could figure out what exactly we have on the floppy.

Some other info were found by Zwackery from the Atari Age Forum, in VideoGames magazine (vol. V, no. 11, Nov 1993). As we can read from the VGM article, “River Raid: The Mission of No Return”  was shown at the summer CES  1991 in Chicago, along with the cancelled Kaboom:  The Mad Bomber Returns.

It seems that “both got killed because the developers couldn’t push the SNES boundaires with either one” as noted by Klove in the Atari Age Forum.

Images:


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monokoma




5 thoughts on “River Raid [SNES – Cancelled]

    1. monokoma Post author

      Interesting! In the video description we read: “Developed to secure a project with Activision, this little prototype was developed in under 6 months. It was eventually picked up by Activision and was to be given the Soldier of Fortune IP. The game had many similarities with Pandemics Mercenaries being an open world free roaming military action game.
      After 12 months more development of which I dont have any footage of the final production build the project was cancelled by Activision.”

  1. Ross Sillifant

    Edge talked to Activision’s Janine Johnson, in a Retrogaming feature back in 1994 and seem to suggest game was cancelled due to a poor reception at the CES show.

  2. KGRAMR

    Has anybody saw already the box unrearthed by Frank Cifaldi posted on Snescentral? If not i’ll leave the link here: https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=1100 Too bad it was not released, as my dad is a HUGE fan of the original on the 2600. While it wasn’t going to push the SNES in terms of graphics, it would’ve been welcome to the library and i hope the game’s ROM (if it still does exists) gets dumped online :-)

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