Dual Heroes is a fighting game for the Nintendo 64, released in 1998 (1997 in Japan) and often mocked and criticised for being one of the worst games ever made. The HUD in the game went through some changes in the development, and looking at the old screens, we can notice at least 3 different styles of energy bars. In particular,the borders were different and there were some portraits for the characters on the sides of the screen.
Beta 01:
Beta 02:
Final version:
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The_IT_08 has wrote a topic in our forum with some beta-screens and a video from Rayman 2 that shows a series of differences. As he says: “Alright in the first picture there is a level called The Minhir Hills, it is a beta version of it, and this takes place in the second section of this level I think (because the walking shell’s starting point which is now the doghouse is close to the thorn pit). The differences are that there wasn’t a giant orange mushroom in there and the place where the walking shell comes from was not a doghouse. And there was a purple
EggHead Shred was rumored to be a prototype for a N64 skiing game by Paradigm Entertainment, where the player could have took control of Paradigm’s mascott, Egghead, a weird egg with “punk” hair. There are not many more details about this, but EggHead was shown with an interactive video at SIGGRAPH 1994 / 1996 (?) where the audience controlled the game with a motion sensing technology.
The people in the room were able to move their hands left / right, up / down and get a corresponding movement with the image on the screen. You can read more about this show at the Cinematrix website. The game was never released and probably it was just created as a tech demo for the SIGGRAPH show and it was not really meant to be a Nintendo 64 game.
As we can read from BW Online, Paradigm Simulations created the game as an offshoot of defense work. Also, as noticed by Hibana, EggHead Shred was featured on the Nickelodeon variety show “U to U” in the mid-1990’s:
“Egghead Shred” by Paradigm – This game had the audience playing a punk-rock “Humpty Dumpty-like” character as he skied his way down a obstacle-laden slope of frying pans and vicious forks (no kidding!). The stunning graphics were produced by a host of Silicon Graphics Reality Engine-based workstations while the audience utilized the Cinematrix IAP as the control interface.
It would be nice to find a video from this U2U episode to see Eddhead in motion.
Thanks a lot to Gilgamesh, Zach and Hibana for the contributions!
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Bomberman 64 is the first 3-D game within the Bomberman series. It also implements a different single-player mode by incorporating action-adventure and platforming stages, instead of arenas in which enemies or other elements must be destroyed. The game was released in Europe on November 27, 1997 and released in North America on December 1 of the same year. [Info from Wikipedia] In the beta version of Bomberman 64, the HUD was different, with more stuff on the screen, while the clock icon was round and not a square like in the final version. You can see a comparison between the beta (at the top) and the final (below). The levels and the characters from these old screens look just the same as the ones in the released game.
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Tommy Thunder was a third person shooter in development for the Nintendo 64 (and later for the PSX too) from Player 1 studios, but it was never released and we never got many informations about it. In November 2007, herpetic.adventures on the LostLevels forum posted an interesting story about a misterious file: “[…] about 10 years ago I was poking around the Player1 website looking for info on when Robotron 64 was coming out. Just for the hell of it, I clicked the “Press Info” link. Which turned out to be an anonymous FTP. Woo. Poked around a bit, and amongst directories of PSX assets, I found robo64.zip and tommy64.zip.” Inside the zipped file, there was what it looks like an early prototype of Tommy Thunder 64 and so, thanks to herpetic.adventures, we finally have some screens from the game to look at! You can read more info about his find in the Lost Levels Forum and check this article on NES World, where you can read some quotes from Tommy Thunder’s developers:
What you have is an early N64 Prototype of Tommy Thunder. The game got signed by ASC games and switched to PlayStation. We made it pretty far into production before ASC Games ran out of money and were forced to cancel the project.
Thanks to Vaettur for the logo!
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