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!
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.
“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
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.
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:
Fantasy Life is a quest-based RPG / adventure game that was developed by Level-5 and Brownie Brown. It was released on Nintendo 3DS in Japan on December 27, 2012, and then later in 2014 in Western territories. However, the game was was first planned to be released on the Nintendo DS; a version, which was later cancelled.
When it began life on DS, the game had a 2D visual style, similar to the one seen in Mother 3. It was first announced at Level-5 Vision 2009 on August 25, 2009, during which time it was being targeted for a 2010 release. The developers presented the first early screenshots of the game at the event, as well as a selection of concept art assets:
Level-5, however, made the call put the project on hold, before resuming development for the 3DS, due to sales forecasts. When it resurfaced on its new platform in October 2010, it was revealed that the game had underwent a big change in art direction. The 2D art of the DS version was done away with, and it had been rebuilt in a 3D engine.
Known in japanese as IKAZUCHI NO GO TOKU (or Kaminari no Gotoku: Choukousoku Igo) this was a simulation based on the ancient board game “Go” for Nintendo 64. Developed by specialist Toyogo Inc, that despite the name was an american company based in Lexington Massachusetts, the game title appeared in Edge magazine issue 41‘s japanese N64 release list with a planned release date for January ’97.
Seta Corporation, Like Thunder ‘Go’ publisher, never released it for unknown reasons thus negating to japanese N64 players the only Go simulation for the system.
Image taken from EGM issue 90, article written by Celine!
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