platform

Popeye [GEN MD – Cancelled]

A platform game based on the Popeye character was in development by Technos Japan for the Genesis / Mega Drive, but in the end this project was cancelled. A Super Nintendo Popeye game was also developed and released in 1994 by Technos, but the sprite of the main character is much different from the one seen in the few Genesis / MD screens, so we can assume that these are 2 different games. As far as we know, Popeye for the Genesis / MD was never released in any territory.

Thanks to Celine and John Doom for the contribution! Scans from Console Mania #28, Game Fun #94 and Mean Machine #17

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Marble Man: Marble Madness 2 [Arcade – Cancelled]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Marble Madness is an arcade video game designed by Mark Cerny, and published by Atari Games in 1984. It is a platform game in which the player must guide an onscreen marble through six courses, populated with obstacles and enemies, within a time limit. The player controls the marble by using a trackball.

An arcade sequel titled Marble Man: Marble Madness II was planned for release in 1991, though Cerny was not involved in the development. Development was led by Bob Flanagan who designed the game based on what he felt made Marble Madness a success in the home console market.

Because the market’s demographic was a younger audience, Flanagan wanted to make the sequel more accessible and introduced a superhero-type main character. Marble Man expanded on the gameplay of the original game by featuring new abilities for the marble such as invisibility and flight, included pinball minigames between sets of levels, and allowed up to three players to traverse isometric courses.

Flanagan intended to address the short length of the first game and, with the help of Mike Hally, developed seventeen courses. Atari created prototypes for location testing, but the game did not fare well against more popular titles at the time such as Street Fighter II.

Atari assumed the track balls accounted for the poor reception and commissioned a second model with joystick controls. Because the new models were met with the same poor reception, production was halted and the focus shifted to Guardians of the ‘Hood, a two-dimensional beat ’em up game. Marble Madness 2 was never officially released, but the few proto machines are in the hands of various collectors.

Thanks to kieranmay and Celine for the contributions!

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Conker Bad Fur Day [N64 – Beta / Unused Stuff / Debug]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64 was originally going to be titled Conker’s Quest and was later titled Twelve Tales: Conker 64. Early beta screenshots suggested the game would feature cute characters and colorful settings. Rare had a long history of making games of this sort, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing, and at first Conker did not appear to be any different. However, Rare started to fear that the game would simply get lost in the platforming crowd, and critical mockery of “yet another cute platformer” caused the original game to be drastically overhauled.

The promotional videos and pictures from Electronic Entertainment Expo (at the time when the game was still called Twelve Tales) revealed objects and characters which have influenced the released game. Objects such as the flower and mushroom sprites were seen in the promotional video and a character closely resembling Buga the Knut was seen chasing Conker (who was wearing a knight’s helmet) in a promotional picture. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is considerably a far different game from the original plans despite the small influences it had on the release game.

Even if the differences with Conker’s Quest / Twelve Tales beta are more obvious, Cubivore10 noticed some little beta differences in the early Conker Bad Fur Day too.

Here we can see that with the exception of Conker the whole screenshot has different textures, maybe be even reused from Twelve tales. The barn (pink roof) looks like it might even be shaped differently. (beta at the top, final at the bottom)

This one’s a bit odd. The only time the fire imps appear in any cutscenes are during the Bat’s Tower chapter. From what little I can see of the background its the boiler room still, but I NEVER recall the fire imps acting like this (I play that chapter on a regular basis FYI) It seems like something has shot off smoking and a fire imp is freaking out. Whatever is on fire by him appears to be burnt. The imps do become grey when Conker urinates on them, however, they don’t shoot off like that.

At about 4:36 in the video below, there is the scene with the fire imps :  it seems to be catching something in his mouth, whatever the smoking thing was.

This beta / unused cutscene was found still hidden in the final game by Goomther and ConkerGuru:

As wrote by Cubivore10:

This short scene was in an earlier trailer. I’m assuming, judging by the way it grows, you would have fought a giant Fire Imp as opposed to the Boiler at some point during development.

As wrote by Fuzzy, it’s quite short but in Goomther’s video it looks like the imp is eating another imp, but in the original it seems the imp is eating something like a burned rat.

Nothing much here, but unless he’s over more to the right than I recall, Birdy the scarecrow isn’t outside the bar.

Another minor detail, but in the final version of the game Gregg’s voice bubble is a dark gray color

The gray squirrel that Conker talks to is holding a walkie-talkie in the beta version (also the changed “tedizs” to “tediz”).

In the video below, at about 1:25 when Conker has to use his slingshot to open the vault, it doesn’t seem to be moving.

Also, Goomther found a weird / unfinished level in the game’s code, that could be an half-removed debug room! Check the video below for a look at this strange area. More unused models and development stuff were found by ConkerGuru in the game’s code (check his website for more!):

The tail of an very popular mouse pokémon. This tail was, according to an post on Chris Seavor’s twitter page, used for an cutscene they were forced to cut on nintendo’s request. When the cutscene played, the tail, obviously, would be placed on the back of the Pikachu model. Whatmore, Conker was also to interact with it during the scene, as there’s some unused animations remaining in the game of Conker sitting on his knees, and petting some creature.

Thanks to Cubivore10 and Goomther for the contributions!

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Gex [3DO PSX SAT – Beta / Unused Stuff]

Gex is a 2D platformer game, developed and published by Crystal Dynamics in march 1995 for the Panasonic 3DO and later for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. Thanks to Gexthegecko we found out that in the final game it’s possible to reach an unused shooting level: it involves taking a certain route in Planet X (check the videos below). There’s also a test levels that include unused sprites from the 3DO version.

Beyond this, there are loads of concept artworks to unlock in the special ending (after the credits roll). It seems that the original plot never involved television and in the early prototype Gex was set in our world instead of its very own fantasy oriented one. There’s also an article with one of the game’s developers, which exposes even more pre-production goodness:

The game was about Gecko X, a Hollywood stuntman (stunt Gecko). The studio he worked for was in financial trouble and helping it fail were the enemies Karl Chameleon and his henchmen like Guido Gila. Each level would be themed around a Hollywood action movie genre. For example the Western. The level intro would show stock footage of old Hollywood western movies (for some reason marketing thought this was the greatest idea ever) and then the level would have Gex going through it doing “stunts”. The better he did the more money the ‘Movie’ made and therefore the better the studio did. One level was designed using that theme and it was just awful. […]

They wanted a 32bit game that would be the next Sonic but they were not willing to put the resources into it that would be required to do it. They had come from a 16 bit world and still thought they only needed a 16bit size team. […]

By June we had decided to get rid of Mode 2 and make each world have only one art set so for example the Horror world dropped the Haunted House art set and became just the graveyard. Done by that time were the graveyard art set, cartoon and sci-fi and almost no enemies. It was around that time that Silicon Knights (creators of Legacy of Kain) were asked to do some enemies for Gex. They cranked out about 26 enemies in about 1 month. Also Steve Suhy was hired and was asked to do many of the enemies.[…]

Since it was now June and the project was not even 50% finished, the company decided to cut the sci-fi levels since none had been done and since they didn’t like the art. That brought the game down to five worlds and they hoped would get the game done by Sept in time for Christmas. […]

Evan had programmed a shooter for his Senior project at Stanford (he was finishing his degree at Stanford and working on this nightmare project and competing in National gymnastics) and we decided to stick that shooter in the game as a bonus. […]

Gex 4 was in early development for the PS2, but it was soon cancelled and only few artworks remain to preserve its existence.

Thanks to Gexthegecko for the contribution!

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Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge [GBA – Beta]

Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge is the third instalment in the Banjo-Kazooie series, and the second in chronological order (in terms of the point of the beginning and end of the game – in fact, as time travel plays a significant part in the plot, most of the action takes place decades before Banjo-Kazooie). Developed by Rareware and published by THQ, it was the first Rare game released after being purchased by Microsoft from Nintendo. [info from Wikipedia]

Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge was originally announced at E3 2001. Initially, it was conceived to be a “What If?” story, taking place in an alternate timeline where Grunty’s sisters do not come to rescue her and thus Banjo-Tooie does not happen, with Grunty’s Revenge taking place instead. This idea was dropped some time before the game was released, and it was instead placed as a side-story in the Banjo timeline, between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie.

Grunty’s Revenge is notable in that it is the only of Rare’s initially-announced Game Boy Advance titles to be released without any major changes due to the buyout of Rare by Microsoft, unlike Diddy Kong Pilot, which became Banjo-Pilot and Donkey Kong: Coconut Crackers, which became It’s Mr. Pants. [info from The Rare Witch Project Wiki]

Thanks to YouTube user transparentjinjo, that uploaded 7 videos from the Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge beta, we can see a few differences to the final version of the game. For one, the textures and graphics are significantly less-developed in the beta footage. In addition, the layout of the worlds appears different, with several areas sporting different names to those in the released version (for example, Freezing Furnace is split into two separate worlds, Freezing Fjord and Fiery Furnace).

The introductory sequence is missing in the beta version, which also uses the “down” arrow to advance in-game text, as well as a few other small changes. You can view the videos, and other interesting development footage, at transparentjinjo’s YouTube channel.

Also, some concept arts and a couple of screenshots from the “3D collision preview tool” are preserved in the gallery below. Quite a lot changed through the development of Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge. The game was reduced from 8-10 levels down to 6, and the story was cut down too.

  • The mad cow was the original boss on the farm level
  • The large mountain on the Fjord was removed when flying was removed from the game, and the remaining Fjord & Furnace sections were combined into one large level
  • The machine seen in “FURNACE_scene” was also lost when the 2 levels were combined
  • As can be seen from the Mecha Grunty pics, she was to have many transformations (tank, bazooka, drill etc) which were removed to save cartridge space
  • “Monster Kazooie” was a concept, but a decision was made to not implement it in the game
  • Swamp monsters (scorpion & spider) were not in the final game, the main swamp monsters were Bogfoot (Bigfoot with a different colour palette)
  • Klungo’s UFO was also too big to fit on cartridge, and replaced with Gruntilda’s ghost floating out of the rock & into the Mecha suit

As we can read from The Rare Witch Project Forum, you went to fight grunty through the lair entrance in the beta, there was a Baby Boggy.

Article by Franklint

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