An archive with screens, info and videos for cancelled, beta and unseen videogames for the Nintendo consoles. Check our archive to understand what it means to preserve lost games.
Link from the X-Cult hack forum, has found some unused characters in the code of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games for the Wii: Birdo, Donkey Kong, Jet & Silver. Other “hidden” characters like Shy Guy, Goomba or the Monkey, are normally used only in the background of the game, but thanks to the WiiRD they became playable and some of them have even animations for the various olympic games.
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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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ODT, Or Die Trying, is a video game created by Psygnosis for the PlayStation and PC. Its style of gameplay is a 3D action adventure, with some RPG elements. Playing as 1 of 4 characters, your goal is to explore the “Forbidden Zone” to look for gas canisters to reinflate your balloon, which had crashed on the roof of a mysterious tower. Along the way you solve puzzles, battle monsters, and so on. A N64 version was completed but never released, though it has somehow been leaked online. [Info from Wikipedia]
In 2020 PIKO Interactive have announced that they have acquired the rights to the game, which includes the unreleased Nintendo 64 version.
Thanks to Henrique Resende, Vaettur and Vitas Varnas for the contribution!
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ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! 🙂
ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! 🙂
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Pop is a WiiWare game by Australian developer Nnooo. The game was released in North America on May 12, 2008 as a launch title and costs 700 Wii Points. Pop involves the player popping bubbles to score points against a time limit. Players click on bubbles that float up the screen using the Wii Remote, gaining bonus points if popping successions of bubbles, and adding more time to the clock. [Info from Wikipedia] In the videos from the beta version, the Bad Bubbles were originally crosses (released version has skulls instead) and they don’t “pop” like the final version, but just disappear when you point and click at them.
Thanks to Gamepopper101 for these infos!
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Wiggler’s Garden was going to be called Petey’s Greenhouse and the original story was about a Piranha Plant that was making a mess in Wiggler’s Garden. Apparently, Petey Piranha was betrayed by a member of his army and was now making a mess in his greenhouse.
Toadsworth was going to be the shopkeeper in the item shop, but was replaced by Monty Mole. But Toadsworth is still mentioned in the shop sometimes even though he is never seen. Another thing that is interesting is that in the Player’s small windows there was going to be an X in front of the money and stars amount, but was taken out in the final version, probably because coins could reach over 100.
Intresting yet sadly, there was going to be WiFi in it, but it never came true. Probably from a lack of time or memory within the game. [Info from Mariowiki]
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ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! 🙂
ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! 🙂
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The game was originally set to have batteries for save the game’s progress. This was probably changed because the beta game was just 1 MB rather than the final version’s 2 MB. The story originally had more orange characters, background and text, a yellow frame a light yellow “painting” and a red logo. Originally, it was ellipses between “Extra Life” and the number of lives, something that was restored in Super Mario All-Stars. The characters didn’t change much, however, Princess Peach, Mario and Luigi didn’t have (more…)
Three Tribes was announced in November of 2004 in a press release by its Dutch developer Two Tribes as an action puzzle game in an overhead perspective designed for all ages. I could only retrieve the Dutch version of the announcement, archive.org unfortunately didn’t cache a page of the English version. The game was designed for the Gameboy Advance and possibly the Nintendo DS; no release date is given for the game and the company had no publishing partner for the game at the moment of the announcement.
Three Tribes sets the player in control of a shaman whose purpose is to help out the natives he meets with their problems. Interaction between the characters, animals, objects and tools found in the game and with the environment itself would be a central part of solving the various puzzles. The game would be set in the same visual perspective as the 2D Zelda games but with a lot more freedom allowing the player to climb, swim and fly anywhere they wanted to. The game also promised a wide variety of mission objectives. The NDS version would differ from the GBA version in having a multiplayer game editor. The editor would allow players to design their own multiplayer levels and create their own objectives and later share them with friends.
Unfortunately Three Tribes was quietly cancelled; the company never found a publisher for the game. The main cause could have been the declining GBA market but I also cannot retrieve how far development of both versions was. I could find only a couple of GBA screenshots and two promotional videos (see below) and absolutely no information on the Nintendo DS version. On the current site of Two Tribes the game is briefly mentioned:
„In the meantime, we’d spent two years developing a physics puzzle adventure game called Three Tribes for Game Boy Advance, though it turned out to be impossible to find a publisher for such an ambitious concept.
The game was stated way into 2010 on the Two Tribes website as a Gameboy Advance title “In development”. After a refreshment of the website later that year the game vanished of the radar and was no longer mentioned. The game still hasn’t vanished completely as its promotional website is still (partly) online. But I think we can consider it cancelled.
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Two Tribes teaser trailer – 2004 – GBA:
Three Tribes – GBA video:
Secret of Mana, known in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2, is an action RPG for the Super Nintendo developed and published by Square. Secret of Mana is the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy and the second installment in the Mana video game series. The game was originally going to be a launch title for the SNES CD add-on. After the project was dropped, the game had to be altered to fit onto a standard game cartridge. [Infos from Wikipedia]
Robert Seddon has made us to notice that according to this article, Square was intending to port the game to the Wonderswan. Given that their Romancing SaGa port featured material cut from the original, it’s a shame the Seiken Densetsu 2 port didn’t happen. You can also read more about he beta differences of Secret of Mana on ManaRedux!
In the gallery below you can see various beta screenshots from that Luis has shared with us: there’s an early version of Potos and Pandora Village, different World Map, many unknown locations, the characters that walk in a river (that is not accessible in the final game), an unused character with pink hair, different HUD, beta Gaia Navel (if you have more infos on the differences in these screens, please let us know!), the hero in a weird place in Water Palace and much more! Also, as you can read in the scan the original title for the english version of the game was going to be Final Fantasy Adventure 2.
In the video below the gallery, recored by Shernoubi, we can notice various unused sprites and a debug room!
Thanks a lot to Luis & pantalytron for the contribution!
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