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Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts [Beta – Xbox 360]

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a Xbox 360 title developed by Rare Ltd. and published by Microsoft in 2008. Unlike it’s predecessors, Nuts & Bolts was not a pure platformer; instead it involved building a car and driving with it. First concepts of this gameplay mechanic reach back to 2002-2004, when a small team was working on a prototype for a new Banjo-Kazooie game – at that time still for the original Xbox.

In 2005/2006, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts evolved from a prototype into a real beta game. Hence choices for the design direction were taken as seen in the following gallery with early concept art. But there were also various changes in the later stages of development. One of the levels in the final game is called “Klungo´s Arcade”, but in the beta version it was called “Klungo´s Play Emporium” and below you can see an image that shows what it was gonna look like. After that, there is a screenshot from the same level in the final version. Do you see the differences?

Beta:

Final:

On the official Rare website we can even read some interesting informations on the sixth removed level from the game: “Partway through all this, we learned that one Game World was to be dropped to give us a chance of getting the game finished on time, bringing the total down from six to five. This was a bit of a headache and involved some redesign, as the Seaside lost its Game World doors to the Docks, which required a different Trolley ability to reach, so certain features got changed or moved about to cope with the restructure. Beyond that, we also had a problem in that the size of the actual Town asset was so big, the game kept running out of memory, so a few things had to be pruned.

The pier used to have a pavilion you could drive through halfway along it, complete with arcade cabinets and a lower deck. That had to go, which was a shame. There was also a harbour beacon near the beach huts that got ripped out too. On the whole, though, there weren’t too many sacrifices made in getting everything stable.”

Thanks to Spiral Mountain Forum users, we even noticed some other differences in the early version of the game, like a different vehicle editor and parts, beta trolley and Grunty under the sun.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was Rare’s third idea in their plans to create a sequel to Banjo-Tooie. In an interview with Gregg Mayles, he said that the first idea was to create a remake of Banjo-Kazooie that would purport to be a direct port, but would feature extreme changes unexpectedly.

For example, a massive queen termite would emerge from the termite hill in Mumbo’s Mountain, causing Banjo to have to get oranges for Conga to throw at it. The second concept involved more traditional platforming, but with Gruntilda trying to follow Banjo and Kazooie around every world and replicating their moves in an effort to better them. The working title for the vehicle idea was Banjo-Buildie, but Mayles stated that it was too similar to the previous titles to have an impact. The team later stated that they had also attempted to make a rather more straight sequel to Tooie without any kind of twist but that they felt it was a “stale” method. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Also, as noted by [Nintex] in the NeoGAF Forum, an entire world was scrapped to reach the deadline:

This world is referenced several times in the game by characters in Showdown Town. A villager references Weird west by saying it was once accessible through the boarded up windows and doorways found near the Pier. LOG makes the comment, “You should be grateful, I could’ve sent you to Hoedown Town. It’s awful. The music, the dancing! Oh my!” A penguin in Showdown Town also makes a reference to this world saying, “You know the docks used to be twice as long? There used to be doors that lead to the Weird West game world.”

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Unused Music:

Thanks a lot to Lord Deathsaur and Nintex for the contribution! 

Glover 2 [N64/PSX/DC – Cancelled]

Glover was a 3D platformer game developed by Interactive Studios Ltd and released for the Nintendo 64 and Playstation in 1998. A sequel was announced for Nintendo 64, Playstation and Dreamcast with a launch originally slated for mid 1999, but was later cancelled.

In 2010, NESworld recovered a playable beta of the Nintendo 64 version of Glover 2 and by October 2011, the ROM was leaked online.

Thanks to Nesworld and Goomther for the contributions!

The Bizarre Story Behind Its Cancellation

On February 25, 2015, James Steele, a programmer formerly of Interactive Studios, released a blog entry detailing the unusual circumstances which led to the cancellation of the game. According to the developer, a huge misstep at Hasbro involving one worker severely over-estimating the amount of cartridges required for the game blemished the Glover name at the company, ultimately resulting in the discontinuation of its sequel:

“…as far as we were told, Glover 2 had been canned because of Glover 1. Now this seems strange, because the first Glover has sold fairly well for a non-Nintendo N64 title. And it was on the back of those sales that Glover 2 had been given the go-ahead at Hasbro in the first place.

But Hasbro had messed up. They had screwed the pooch big time. You see, when ordering the carts for the first game, the standard production run was something like 150,000 units. And this is what the management at ISL had advised Hasbro to order – because the N64 wasn’t really fairing that well compared to the PS1 at the time and non Nintendo titles tended to sell poorly. They thought that Glover was a good game in its own right, and a moderate 3rd party success would sell around 150,000 units. And that is exactly what happened. Hence the go ahead for the sequel.

So Glover was a money maker for Hasbro, right? Right? Nuh-uh. As it happened, Nintendo had a special on N64 carts at the time the game was being schedule for production. Some bright spark at Hasbro thought it would just be absolutely SUPER to order double the normal amount – so they put in an order 300,000 units at a slightly reduced cost.

The problem was that none of the retailers wanted to take that stock off Hasbro’s hands. The game had been moderately successful, but the demand just wasn’t there. And thus Hasbro was left with 150,000 or so copies of Glover for the N64 that nobody wanted. That’s something like half-a-million dollars worth of stock that they can’t shift. And with Hasbro Interactive not being in the best of financial shape Glover became a dirty word around the company, as it became apparent over the course of Glover 2 development that they were stuck with all those carts.

Of course, the blame was put on the game and brand itself rather than the idiot who ordered the extra 150,000 carts from Nintendo. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Glover 2 had been cancelled.”

According to Steele, who we later caught up with, the game was around 80-85% complete at the time development ceased.

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Kid Kirby [SNES – Cancelled]

Kid Kirby was meant to be a “prequel” of the series, a platform game with a younger Kirby (with hair?) that was in development at DMA Design, the makers of Uniracers, Silicon Valley and Lemmings. A little image from this game was already seen in an old magazine, but only recently we found more concepts from the project, thanks to a flickr account from an ex-DMA developer. From an article on Gamasutra we read that Kid Kirby “was to be a showcase for the SNES mouse, but the mouse did not sell that well and the game was not great when played with a joypad, so it never saw the light of day”.

Additional Kid Kirby renders were discovered on a 1995 Nintendo Source Book binder intended for retailers. These pictures were taken by Tomato and Heidi Poe of Earthbound Central.

You can find more about the Kirby series in the WiKirby!

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Happy Camper [NES – Unreleased]

Lost Levels has recently talked about an interesting discovery: a working proto of Happy Camper, an unreleased platform / action game that was in development by Color Dreams for the NES. It seems that the game was too hard to play.. and after some changes in the difficulty level options, it was already too late to release the title with a decent economic margin. You can check the original story at Lost Levels for more infos and screens!

Thanks to NGD for the additional screenshots!

More infos: NGD & Happy Camper Interview

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Sonic 3 & Knuckles [MD/G – Beta / Unused Levels]

Sonic & Knuckles was developed by the Sega Technical Institute in collaboration with Sonic Team, and published by Sega for the Genesis/Mega Drive in 1994. It is the direct sequel to Sonic 3, which was released earlier that year and it seems that some removed levels from S3 were later re-used for S&K. As our friends at X-Cult say: “Sonic & Knuckles is, at it’s heart, a continuation of Sonic 3; or rather, a collection of Sonic 3’s lost levels and then some”. It seems that the project was originally named “Sonic 3 & Knuckles”

In these beta images we can see an unknown “carnival night zone” and the Sonic 2 “Hidden Palace” in the hacked level-select menu screen,  while in the other gameplay ones there are probably just graphical differences that are minor.

Also, Interesting fact to note. Sonic 3 and Knuckles Developer Roger Hector points out that Sonic 3 and Knuckles was going to be an isometric 3D style game in a similar fashion to sonic 3D blast. Also, it was confirmed that Micheal Jackson did work on the game’s soundtrack. The soundtrack was re-written by Howard Drossin due to the development team removing Jackson’s soundtrack cause of a child molestation scandal near the end of the game’s development cycle.

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