World Reborn is a cancelled 2d shooter developed by Neopong. In a 2008 post at the now defunct workingdesignsmb board, one of the developers explained why the project was shelved:
[…]Basically because the first publisher contact liked our basic demo (and boy did it look primitive by comparison) and thought it had some promise, they got us officially licensed for the GBA. That publisher seemed to undergo some kind of massive corporate restructuring and our contact there vanished in the process. We were offered a pretty raw deal (less than 30% royalties down from 50% royalties on a completed game) and went our separate ways. As a result of that licensure, though, we were able to bid on GBA projects successfully and eventually netted our first real contracted work with another publisher. Also after the GBA licensure, we were somehow able to get immediately approved for all future Nintendo consoles (the people at Nintendo were great to work with). Several other publishers expressed interest in World Reborn, but none of them ever panned out in the end.[…]
Interestingly, he also talked about more unreleased games:
What I hate even more is that we never got to finish World Reborn 2 (DS game) or Project DA (which we have a very early town engine prototype for, I’ll be putting it up soon too).
At the end, Neopong decided to release the game on their website:
My partners and I have finally completely given up on the ability to get this game out in some form or fashion (DS/Wii remake, Cellphone version, etc…), so rather than let it never see the light of day or be played by anyone, we’ve decided to just make it freely available for download.[…]
Unfortunately, Neopong site doesn’t work anymore, but the rom can be still easily found through a google search. If you are a collector, you can also buy an official release cart of World Reborn for GBA thanks to Piko Interactive!
Images:
Videos:
