Unseen 64 was given the great opportunity to talk to Nick Bruty President and Co-Founder of Planetmoon Studios. This article will be focusing on his time spent with Shiny Entertainment working on Earthworm Jim 1 and 2.
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Unseen Interview: Nick Bruty and Earthworm Jim
[Interview by EWJ]
Unseen 64 was given the great opportunity to talk to Nick Bruty President and Co-Founder of Planetmoon Studios. This article will be focusing on his time spent with Shiny Entertainment working on Earthworm Jim 1 and 2. It’s important to note that the visual concepts he’s referring to in the first sentence are these two cut levels:
Nick Talks about the Earthwom Jim 1&2 Development:
Kirby’s Adventure [NES – Beta / Unused]
Kirby’s Adventure is a platform game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the NES in 1992 (Japan) and 1993 (USA andEurope). As we can read at Wiki Rusted Logic, the game features a great amount of debug rooms and unused content, some of which would end up in future Kirby games.
Miniboss test rooms. Not just any minibosses though — these rooms have the faster, more difficult versions of Bugzzy, Poppy Bros. Sr., Rolling Turtle, and Mr. Tick Tock that are found in stage 7-2’s hidden route.
Rooms 0142-0144: These rooms, however, weren’t used. Meta Knight battles for the layouts of rooms #142 & #144 still exist in the game, but not for room #143.
Room 0145: A pretty cool cannon puzzle that’s only accessible from the debug room. To get the cannon to fire, you have to pound in the stake with the Hammer or Stone abilities, then quickly inhale the Laser Ball to get the Laser ability. Next, quickly fire a laser at the slope at the bottom before the ice block appears to block you, then hop into the cannon. It’s tricky to get it timed right, but it does work.
Unused Ability : these tiles of a tiny Kirby are found in sprite bank 8C, along with the graphics for the Mike and Ball abilities. These graphics were possibly used for an ability that no longer exists in the game. The oddly sized Kirby would have been used for a shrinking animation […] This Mini ability might have been replaced with the UFO power [..] 12 years later, this ability would finally be implemented in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. However, in that game, you can’t slide while using this power.
Also, CrashAndSonicChao found the lost Mini Kirby sprites thanks to a sprite editor:
Thanks to ORKAL‘s Youtube Channel we can see an interesing video that shows many of the unused content.
You can find more about the Kirby series in the WiKirby!
Images:
Videos:
Jet Force Gemini [GBC – Cancelled]
A GameBoy Color version of Jet Force Gemini was in development by Bit Studios (for Rare) in 2000, but it was cancelled in the end. The original JFG is a third-person shooter / action adventure published for the Nintendo 64 in October 1999, but the GBC version was never officially announced.
We were able to know about this cancelled project only thanks to Dano2k0 from the Assembler Forum, that found a playable prototype and shared some screens with the community. Rare released 2 other GameBoy Color games based on their Nintendo 64 titles, Perfect Dark and Conker’s Pocket Tales, that were received with low interest by gamers: we could speculate that their third GameBoy Color “N64 port” was canned for this reason or for quality issues.
Jet Force Gemini GBC was going to have an isometric 2D view, while the gameplay was probably going to be “similar” to the N64 version, with lots of shooting and insects to kill.
As we can read in an interview with Martin Wakeley:
JFG on the Gameboy was the only occasion I can remember Rare outsourcing anything. It was being done by Bits Studios and was nearly done last time I saw it, I’m not sure what happened to it.
Images:
God of War: Chains of Olympus [PSP – Beta]
God of War: Chains of Olympus is an action adventure developed by Ready at Dawn and released in march 2008 for the PSP. As we can read on Wikipedia, the game had already been in the development stages just before the completion of Daxter, when Ready At Dawn pitched the idea of a God of War game for the PSP to SCEA’s Santa Monica Studios.
In an interview after the game was completed, director Ru Weerasuriya stated that several things had to be cut from the game given time constraints. These included multiplayer and co-op aspects as well as other puzzles, characters and dialogue
Also, from an article at Industry Gamers, we found out that the game could have been a side scroller action game:
Dana Jan, lead level designer on the game, revealed that Ready at Dawn briefly thought about making the game 2-D. “There were early discussions of making Chains of Olympus a side-scroller rather than 3D in case the experience couldn’t be fully realized on a handheld,” he said. “This really fueled us to prove that it could be done.”
In the gallery below you can see some footage (thanks to L1qu1dSnak3‘s YT channel1) from the early development of the game: the “Making of Attica” (prototype of the first level) and “The Lost Levels” (removed areas and scenes) videos can be unlocked in the final game (Beat the game in God mode and finish the Challenge of Hades).
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
Videos: