“In 1997, Z-Axis Games was developing an official Rollerball video game adaption based on the film As part of MGM Interactive video game showcase lineup, The video game’s promise was to recreate the action of the futuristic game played in the movie, and it was set 10 years after the events of the film in the 2098 Rollerball season, where the player would be in charge of managing their Rollerball teams around the world, made up of Rollerball players with roles such as strikers, enforcers, guard, and other players who compete using jet bikes and magnetic in-line skates. Rollerball: The Video Game was slated to be released for PlayStation, PC, and Nintendo 64 on the first quarter of 1998, but was delayed to mid-1998 and then was canceled due to the publisher, MGM Interactive, going bankrupt.”
Red Baron 64 is a cancelled Nintendo 64 World War I fighter aircraft game that was in development by Sierra: the project was going to be a “remake” of the original Red Baron game that was released on PC in 1990, originally developed by Dynamix. The few screenshots available could have been taken from the PC version and we can only wonder if Sierra really started to work on the N64 version or it was just announced as an idea but then never worked on.
According to SQUARE (Final Fantasy’s Creators), they planned to have their next-gen Final Fantasy on Nintendo’s 64-bit console in early 1996. Different people said that the game would have a simultaneous launch in America and Japan. SQUARE experimented with the CGI capablities of the machine. This famous video often know as “Final Fantasy 64” was not a real game running on the Nintendo 64 hardware, but just a tech demo running on powerful PCs, with three-dimensional characters based on Final Fantasy 6.
English translation by Championman
For more infos on the fight between Square and Nintendo: Square VS Nintendo
[spoiler /Clicca qui per la versione in Italiano/ /Nascondi la versione in Italiano/]Secondo SQUARE, un nuovo capitolo di Final Fantasy sarebbe stato in lavorazione per il Nintendo Ultra 64 già all’inizio del 1996. Voci parlavano di un lancio simultaneo negli Stati Uniti e nel Giappone. Squaresoft per prima cosa ha cominciato provando le potenzialità del nuovo hardware a 64 bit producendo delle demo in CGI (non giravano su vero hardware Nintendo) con alcuni personaggi tridimensionali basati su Final Fantasy 6.
We all remember Conker Bad Fur Day as one of the most original (at least conceptually) games ever released on Nintendo 64. But we also remember how it looked before, when it was called Conker: Twelve Tales or Conker’s Quest: the quintessential cute-looking platform. However, apart from the graphic style, the first version of Conker had some interesting features not found in released version. The overworld was probably bigger and there were more levels, like, as you can seen from the screenshots on this page, a Toy and an Ice stage, more bosses,more moves and gadgets (including vehicles) for Conker. Also, the game was slightly different if played with Berry, the cute friend of Conkey, because she would have had to raise monsters in order to fight the enemies. The most significant feature was however the co-op mode, which allowed two players to cooperate in the adventure mode. Unfortunately, only some places and characters were ported to BFD, although with heavy changes, like the Scarecrow, the Cyclops (that became the giant boss of the prehistoric world), the windmill, many locations and gameplay ideas of the phehistoric world, etc. We can only hope that in the future a proto of this game will be leaked for everyone to enjoy.
The first 64-bit version of Zelda, was originally conceived as a way designed to use the features of 64DD. Internal Clock, rewritable discs with a size double what had ever been used on the cartridge, internet connection and tools for editing images, Zelda 64 was presented by Nintendo itself as a title so huge that it would be impossible to implement on a normal N64.
All this because of the possibility of 64 Disc Drive. But there was only one small problem: the 64DD was not greeted with much interest from professionals, remembering the bad purpose made by all previous add-on for console, the DD was growing slowly postponed, Nintendo itself lost confidence in the project and it was not clear if it ever really left. At this point, Nintendo had no other choice, because of low sales of the N64, they announced that Zelda 64 would have been ported to normal cartridges, so hoping to renew interest in the console market. But this change meant they had to remove all those interesting features that would have been only possible thanks to 64DD and part of the game and history had to undergo an extream cut.
From an interview with N-ZONE magazine (translated with google and reported by GoNintendo) we can read that Aonuma admits that Ocarina of Time originally had more temples and magic abilities that were cut.
Eiji Aonuma: Yes, you may be absolutely right, although I can not remember exactly all the details. There really is a difference between the temples, which we wanted to integrate and those that exist in the final game. And that had something to do with magic. We thought of integrating some actions, some plot threads, and some puzzles that have something to do with magic abilities.
We have come to the conclusion that other, already existing, just regular items to be a worthy replacement. So we had originally three temples, which would capture the young Link, three temples for the adult Link and three in which he was to learn each spell – but instead we have eliminated a temple of it. In the final game is now so 3 plus 3 plus 2, or 8 temples to find.
Also, some more interesting info from the early beta / prototype version of Zelda 64 were shared in the Iwata Asks dedicated to the Ocarina of Time 3D remake:
Iwata: Oh, he wanted to make an FPS (first-person shooter). Koizumi: Right. In the beginning, he had the image that you are at first walking around in first-person, and when an enemy appeared, the screen would switch, Link would appear, and the battle would unfold from a side perspective.
[…]
Iwawaki: But…I do think we tried out a first-person perspective a little. Osawa: I think we made something to try it out, but decided it wasn’t interesting visually and abandoned it right away.
[…]
Iwata: You were originally developing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64DD.13 Koizuma: Yes. Miyamoto-san said he had some ideas, like leaving behind all of Link’s footprints. Iwata: Yeah. (laughs)
[…]
Koizuma: That’s why he started saying that if Link was going to ride a horse, he wanted to include mounted archery and one-on-one battle. (laughs) We were able to include the mounted archery, but not the one-on-one battle. Iwata: But later you included it in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
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