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Unseen News

In January 2010 Kirakid from the Nintendo Age Forum was able to find a previusly unknow NES Sound Editor at a Swap Meet in Orange County California. It was later discovered that this cart is a prototype music development tool created by Tommy Tallarico (the artist who wrote the music for more than 250 games, including the Earthworm Jim series, Messiah, MDK, Wild 9, Unreal, Cool Spot and Maximo) to write an NES Sound engine that he put on Color A Dinosaur.

After Kirakid sold this prototype to the NA community, Mr.Mark and BeaglePuss dumped and released it for everyone to enjoy. You can download Tommy Tallarico’s Play Me Sound Editor from the Nintendo Age Forum!

Also, Tommy commented this find on the Nintendo Age Forum (thanks to Frank Cifaldi):

“Holy shit! Yeah… those are my carts. And the “Tommy T.” label is my handwriting. The “Golf Power” was an old cartridge casing that I erased over… I was a game tester for Golf Power so when the game was completed I used the cart to put an NES sound engine on it for when I was working on Color A Dinosaur!
It’s actually a pretty historical cartridge because Color A Dinosaur is always heralded as the worst game I ever worked on… which drives the price of the actual NES cart up because so many people try to find it. I’ve signed a ton of those things. The complete NES Color A Dinosaur story can be found here.
There are a handful of videos on YouTube of the game
Also… that was right during the time when I went from a game tester to a composer (which is why I used my Greg Norman cart).
Pretty crazy!!
Make sure to pass on this info and the story with the cart. It’s a pretty interesting piece.”

Huge props to Kirakid, BeaglePuss and Mr.Mark for sharing this interesting piece of NES history with the community!

Unseen News

RS Links: a Star Trek RPG pitch by Bethesda

monokoma

02-02-2010

No Comments

Bethesda Softworks created some of the most acclaimed western RPG, as The Elder Scrolls series and the latest entry in the Fallout series (after the license was taken from Black Isle Studios). In january 2010, Todd Howard (Bethesda’s Executive Producer and Game Director) revealed on a Kotaku podcast that Bethesda tried to pitch a Star Trek RPG, but in the end the project was never developed. As we can read on Kotaku:

“Nothing was developed internally,” Howard told KTR. “There was a pitch to do a big Star Trek RPG. [But] we were doing other things, we made Fallout. We can’t do everything.”

It could be interesting to see what exactly they did for this pitch (Concept artworks? Design documents?), but probably we’ll never have the chance.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!

Unseen News

[New Unseen Interview] Raven Software’s Manveer Heir

U64 Staff & Contributors

28-01-2010

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The issue we face most in our archiving is the lack of information that is given to the public about what happens to their favorite series, so many stories left untold so to speak. The most we ever get are early demonstrations, as security today on what gets left behind is much stricter than that of the 80’s. We had the chance to chat with Manveer Heir from Raven Software and asked him some questions about games’ development! >> Read the full interview

Leaked, Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Sonic Rush [DS – Beta / Unused Stuff]

U64 Staff & Contributors

27-01-2010

1 Comment

Sonic Rush is a platform game developed by Sonic Team and Dimps, published in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. Various screenshots from pre-release versions of the game show slightly different areas, different HUD, slightly different gameplay and the first screenshot of Blaze the Cat shows a Sonic life icon while, in the final version, Blaze has her own life icon. We can also notice a different main menu screen.

The Beta version had a totally different soundtrack for the main menu, for the Leaf Forest, for the boss stages and the end of an act. Also, some FX sounds are different from the final version (Sonic’s voice is different too).

In January 2007 DRX from the Hidden Palace released a prototype version of the game, that was shown at E3 2005. In the E3 version you were meant to play only one level, but Tanks from Sonic Retro has found out that there are 7 zones listed in the proto, and 3 are playable via hacking. He also found an unused set of sprites from Sonic Advance 3, but we don’t know how they were used in the development of Sonic Rush.

More info can be found at Sonic Retro and Sonic Retro Forum (this and this topics)

Thanks to Hiccup and YamiHoshi for the contributions!

Images:

Videos:

Unseen News

RS Links: the unreleased Burnout Paradise’s content

monokoma

20-01-2010

5 Comments

Over at the official Burnout / Criterion blog, they wrote a post about planned Download Content that was meant to be released for Burnout Paradise, as new tracks, modes and vehicles, but for some reasons they never finish them.

We were very interested in the whole concept of downloadable content, and we knew that we wanted to approach it very differently and push it as far as we could. A downloadable Island was started almost immediately after the main game was built.

[…]

We did have ambitious plans for a series of Islands. One was going to be purely off-road based. Hence we created the ‘Dust Storm’ dune buggy in anticipation for that. Our original dreams for Paradise were to create a series of Islands, all connected to Paradise City and each would focus on a different style of racing game. One Island was going to be completely circuit based – and be all marked up like a modern Formula One circuit!

[…]

Planes. A lot of Burnout fans already know about this – as we showed flying around in a live podcast. It was really cool to be able to see Paradise City from the air. It did not happen because of the way the game world was built. The city was never meant to be seen from such viewpoints. Think of it like a film set, a very big film set – meant to be seen from certain camera angles and not others.

[…]

The Moon! Again, completely true. Someone on the team said that ‘players want the moon on a stick when it comes to DLC’ We thought that was funny and thought we’d do it. The actual surface of the real Moon was modelled and it was drive-able. Lunar Challenges would have been totally unexpected – as would have been zero gravity Takedowns and Challenges.

[…]

Time Travel – Not many know about this, but it was discussed. On a certain day, a time portal would have opened on the Island. When you jumped through, you would have found yourself on Big Surf, at another point in history. Maybe the Wild West…you could have done some Challenges and then jumped back.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!