SNES + Super Famicom

Kunio-kun Kart [SNES – Cancelled / Concept]

Kunio-kun is a famous series developed by Technos Japan and it was their mascot in Japan. Despite the first game was a beat’em up, soon Technos used the characters for games in other kind of genres, even puzzle games. The most well known Kunio-kun spin off were those concerning sport games ( dodge ball, beach volley, football, basket, hockey, baseball ), always presented through Kunio-kun crazy and not-so-serious atmosphere the series is known for.

Yoshihisa Kishimoto, one of the main men behind Kunio-kun, revealed on his site how a go-kart racing game starring Kunio for Super famicom was in a preliminary phase in early ’90. The idea probably sprung after witnessing Super Mario Kart huge success on the platform. Unfortunately it seems the game never went into production and soon after ( 1996 to be exact ) the japanese developer declared bankruptcy.

Images (Concept arts): 

Super Off Road [Beta – SNES]

Update: the Magazine says Ultra 64 but those captures are from Super Off Road: The Baja for Super Nintendo from Software Creations

Williams Entertainment was one of the first third-party to show support for Nintendo 64 even before the console had that final name and specifications. In fact they showed at E3 ’95 two tech demo, one was No Fear Racing while the other was an off road racing game tentatively called Off Road. It’s very likely that this early demo was the base for the N64 racer Off Road Challenge.

Images taken from Cd Consoles issue 4

Images: 

Super Turrican [Beta – SNES]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Super Turrican was developed by Factor 5 and published by Seika for the Super Nintendo. Factor 5’s Super Turrican plays similarly to Mega Turrican and shares a similar visual style, but the game has a different set of levels and features a freeze beam in place of the original lightning whip. DEC noticed some reference about the beta version of Super Turrican on the Factor 5 web site (http://www.factor5.de/secrets_super_turrican.shtml) and several other web site relay this information when the already known version was planned to the Wii virtual console. 

Tales of Phantasia [Beta – SNES]

Tales of Phantasia is a Jrpg developed by Wolfteam and published, only in Japan, by Namco for SNES in 1995. The game was originally based on an unpublished novel, Tale Fantasia, but, as we can read from Aselia wikia, the programming team encountered many difficulties in dealing with the publisher:

Several changes exist between the initial concept of Tale Phantasia and the published game, due to Namco’s interference with Wolfteam’s efforts, eventually cutting them out of the process and removing them from the credits towards the end of development. This includes changing the character artist from Yoshiaki Inagaki to the now-familiar Kousuke Fujishima, resulting in entirely redesigned and renamed characters with in-game sprites that are based on original artwork and not Fujishima’s revisions, which are shown in the status art, along with several alterations to key chars and plot points. A grand majority of the story was cut from the game, and no attempt was made to close the plot holes that were created by Namco’s actions.

In the beta pics below we can see the original character design of Inagaki and a scan of a pre-release version of Tales of Phantasia. I played the game ten years ago, so i don’t remember it too well, and the scan is low quality, but i don’t see any major changes. If you have more informations please make a comment and we’ll update the post.

Thanks to Youloute of the Assembler forum for the scan.

Below is a few sprites that are ripped from the final version of Tales of Phantasia, but these sprites go completely unused. They’re ‘angel’ sprites for when Raise Dead is used. Some of them are completely unknown, but clearly Brambert, Rhea and Morrison are in the list. Brambert was in the beta of Tales of Phantasia, as seen in the image below. Not much is known about Rhea but it appears NPC’s may have been usable in battle. There’s also a ‘Tactics’ icon for both Brambart and Rhea as well. Not too mention both of their names are stored in the same area as Cress and Co.’s.

Thanks to Justin3009 for the contribution!

Images: 

Killer Instinct 2 [SNES – Cancelled]

Killer Instinct 2 is a fighting game developed by Rare, licensed by Nintendo and manufactured by Midway in 1996.  A modified version of KI2 appeared on the Nintendo 64 as Killer Instinct: Gold, but a SNES version of KI2 was also developed and completed but never released. [Info from Wikipedia]

As noticed by Molasar:

On twitter in 2015 Tim Stamper shared a photo of his old gaming stuff with a KI2 SNES development cart pcb on it.

Post by Justin Fowler

Videos (from the arcade version):