October 2010 - Unseen64: Beta, Cancelled & Unseen Videogames!

The Incredible Shrinking Character is a cancelled action adventure game that was in development by Go-Go Interactive Studios and that would have been published by Cyberdreams for the Playstation, Saturn and PC in 1996. The plot involved a crazy doctor that shrinked the main character with an experimental potion. Players would had to explore the (now) huge laboratory resolving puzzles, to find a way to return to normal. As we can read at Bill Narum’website, former owner of Go Go Studios:

The year is 1959. You are a Private Investigator hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Julie Caldwell, daughter of a wealthy east-coast industrialist family. The subject, in her early twenties, was last reported heading to visit the home and laboratory of Dr. Warren Franklin. […]
On the afternoon of January 30th, you head off to the doctor’s castle for the interview of a lifetime. Unknown to you, Dr. Franklin has laid a trap, and you awaken in a stupor to find yourself only 3 feet tall and gradually shrinking. You realize now that finding Julie will be no simple task. […]
Another reoccurring sound you can’t help but notice is that of a female screaming, most likely the victimized Julie. The volume and intensity increases as you approach the dungeon. You must find the antidote and save Julie soon, but first you must evade becoming dinner for the doctor’s house cat, and numerous other deadly creatures, bats, rats, roaches and ants, etc. that inhabit the mysterious castle.

They planned at least 10 levels in the game, in which the main character would have shrinked more and more each hour, leaving us to deal with big ants and size-based puzzles. A short preview of The Incredible Shrinking Character with some screens were published in NextGeneration magazine issue 14 and some more info on the project can be found at Bill Narum’website. You can even download a playable beta demo for PC! Huge props to Bill for preserving some documents of this lost game!

Thanks to Celine for the contribution! Thanks to Ari for a backup of the demo!

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Mega Drive / Genesis, Nintendo, Sega, SNES + Super Famicom

Rocket Rescue [SNES MD GEN – Cancelled]

monokoma

30-10-2010

2 Comments

Rocket Rescue is a cancelled action game that was in development for the Super Nintendo, Mega Drive / Genesis and Amiga in 1994. Players would had to save people on different planets, exploring the space with a rocket in more than 100 levels. The project would have been published by Hot Shot Entertainments, but we dont know which development team was behind it.

In the end Rocket Rescue was never released and there are basically no more info available about the game or what happened to its publisher. If you know someone that worked on this project, please let us know!

Thanks to Rod_Wod for the scans!

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Jack and the Beanstalk [N64 DD – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

29-10-2010

5 Comments

Jack and the Beanstalk was a game being developed for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. It was originally advertised in February 1995, but was not heard of again until February 1998, when more details of the game’s development emerged. However, the game was never released, and very little is known about its specific operation.

Presumably this intriguing game was similar in plot or gameplay to the traditional fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Unfortunately, we will probably never know for sure.

As Jack slept, the beans germinated in the soil, and by morning a gigantic beanstalk grew in their place. When Jack saw the huge beanstalk, he immediately decided to climb it. He arrived in a land high up in the clouds that happened to be the home of a giant.

Jack and the Beanstalk was being developed on the second floor of the Nintendo Kanda building, under the supervision of HAL Laboratories, by a team of ten or more employees, lead by Youichi (Yoichi) Yamamoto. Yamamoto, originally a construction designer, was one of several non-video game-industry personnel selected to work on the project by a panel of four important Nintendo figures: Shigesato Itoi, Satoshi Iwata, Kouichi Nakamura and Shigeru Miyamoto himself. It is not clear why Nintendo specifically sought out professionals from other fields to work on Jack and the Beanstalk.

The game was slated as being a brand new type of video game, and one that utilised the features of the N64DD to their full extent. Although the game was never completed, many of its flagship features eventually found their way into different games, such as Pokémon Snap and EarthBound 64.

As we can read on Kotaku:

“Originally, Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 system wasn’t a Pokémon game,” recalls Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, “but rather a normal game in which you took photos, but the motivation for playing the game wasn’t clear.” […] Game designer Masanobu Yamamoto was working on Pokémon Snap, and he initially had a negative reaction to the addition of Pokémon, because the characters replaced what he was working on. “That time, adopting the Pokémon world clarified what we should do and the direction we should head,” Yamamoto adds, “and I came to like Pokémon, so I felt like that had saved us.”

As noted by Andy, in the intro of Pokemon Snap, along with the “HAL”, “Nintendo” logos, we can see the text “Jack and Beans”:

From the credit list on Mobygames, JACK and BEANS seems to have been the name of the main team behind the game, which director was the same Yamamoto that lead the Jack and Beanstalk project:

JACK and BEANS
Director: Yoichi Yamamoto, Koji Inokuchi, Akira Takeshima
Designer: Shigezo Kawase, Takeyuki Machida, Masanobu Yamamoto, Shizu Higashiyama

Other possible features that were taken from Jack and the Beanstalk, could have been evolved in EarthBound 64 (a game that was also cancelled), as the N64DD’s internal clock was to be used to allow the real-time growth of planted in-game seeds. This mechanic seems to stem (excuse the pun) from Jack and the Beanstalk. It is also likely that the 3-day system system used in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is similar to how time would have been used in Jack and the Beanstalk. It is listed under “Simulation” in various N64 unreleased listings, which supports the idea of the player growing his or her own seed or seeds.

Thanks to Redstar and Celine for the contributions!

Sadly there are no images of Jack and the Beanstalk preserved for now.

Video documentario (in Italian):

Others, PC / MAC

X-Com Genesis [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

28-10-2010

1 Comment

As we can read on Wikipedia, X-COM: Genesis is a cancelled RTS in the X-COM series, that was in development by MicroProse and then by Hasbro Interactive. The game was never completed due to Hasbro’s shutdown of Hasbro Interactive in late 1999. For this project the team developed a “Geoscape” view of Earth from orbit, that far surpassed the implementation in previous versions.

The team also created a level editor to allow the artists to build levels for the “Battlescape”—the areas where battles against the alien invaders would take place. In an early tech demo we can see an urban environment with a filling station, warehouse, an apartment building, attached parking garage, a park, a burning trashbin and streetlights that cast pools of light. Floating above it all was a blimp with floodlights streaming earthward. Standing in formation outside their aircraft were the X-COM soldiers, shifting on their feet, looking left to right.

Some more info can be found in an interview with Dave Ellis:

As for the “true to the original game” part, absolutely! Genesis was designed to follow the same basic game formula as UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep—research, buying/building, recruiting, intercepting UFOs, and fighting tactical missions. The mechanics of the game in the strategy layer (the Geoscape and all related screens) were virtually identical to those of the first two games. The combat portion of the game was going to have a very similar feel, but it would have had slightly different mechanics (real-time, for instance—more on that later).

Thanks to f2bnp for the contribution!

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Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Squaresoft Mode 7 Demo [SNES – Tech Demo]

U64 Staff & Contributors

28-10-2010

1 Comment

Squaresoft Mode 7 Demo is a “tech demo” made by Sunsoft for testing the system hardware of the Super Nintendo…

Squaresoft Mode 7 starts with Squaresoft logo and appears a exclusive “panda” on the screen:

The name of this character has been discovered with the ROM IMAGE, Panda Squaresoft Mode 7 Demo (PD) showed up on an SuperNintendo Emulator. You can read more about this cartridge at SNES Central!

Back in the mid 90s, Square set up a studio in Redmond, Washington, and produced the game Secret of Evermore. Keith and another person named Craig Bergman got to tour Squaresoft’s office as part of a high school job shadowing activity. While there, Squaresoft scanned and put two drawings made by Keith happened to have into a Mode 7 demo (the other had a caricature of Craig).

In July 2010, this cartridge has appeared on Ebay, the curious about it, this demo have an similar controls to the airship parts of FFIV. This tech demo has been dumped years ago, and posted at the Internet

About the controls, you can flip the camera, zoom in, and stop the animation with start button… That’s all

Also, the scanned “panda” character made by Keith: