sport

Rap Basketball [Cancelled – SNES / Mega Drive / Genesis]

Rap Basketball is a cancelled sport game that was in development by Motown Records for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Thanks to D we have some more info that can be preserved about this unreleased game:

In 1994, Motown Records had wanted to enter into the video game industry, because Virgin was doing well.
Their first product was going to be called “Rap Basketball” and was said to actually have ‘Snoop Dog’ signed among other Rap artists. In January 1995, I was the sole artist assigned to the project at the time, and went out to research graffiti walls in order to paint cool backgrounds for SNES/SEGA ports using Deluxe Paint II, Deluxe Animation II, and Tume. Here are two actual screenshots day and night of the basketball court (missing the ‘boom-box’ and ‘player-characters’) I think it would have been a really fun game, too bad Motown decided against entering the video game business a few months later.

Thanks to SNES Central for some of these images!

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Hit the Ice [NES – Unreleased]

Hit the Ice is a cancelled Taito NES port of the popular 1990 arcade hockey game of the same name. Unlike the completed SNES home console port of Hit the Ice, the cancelled NES version centers around a “Quest Mode” with RPG elements. Much like the Dragon Warrior series, the player walks around an overworld map, exploring houses and stadiums and facing random encounters with rival hockey teams which provide experience and gold.

Shops sell P Drinks, which provide a temporary speed and power boost; hamburgers, which provide experience; and apples, which can be given to an old man somewhere on the world map in exchange for an inner tube, which allows the player to cross bodies of water safely.

Though there is a working prototype with a completable Quest Mode, the game’s RPG elements are very low on content and game balance. As the SNES came out and interest in the NES waned, Taito abandoned this experimental hockey RPG to focus on 16-bit development, without a Quest Mode.

For more info, Frank Cifaldi has a short feature on Hit the Ice here at LostLevels.org where you can also find Hit The Ice’s prototype rom.

Article written by Nate Edwards

Thanks a lot to NES World for these screenshots!

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