Canceled Nintendo Treasures: You will never play these titles

Canceled Nintendo Treasures

The path to a finished product is often long and arduous. It starts with simple articles, every editor knows it: You write straight away, only to find out a little later that you are dissatisfied with the result. Delete and try again is the motto, and this also applies to the development of entertainment media! In some cases, however, the end result is not a finished product, but the efforts were all in vain, projects are crushed and sometimes never see the light of day. This special is supposed to be about such candidates; Games that never came out, and for a variety of reasons.

Table of Contents

Page 1 Canceled Nintendo treasures: You will never be able to play these titles, Page 1 1.1 Donkey Kong's Fun with Music 1.2 Seiken Densetsu: The Emergence of Excalibur 1.3 Jet Force Gemini 1.4 Fall-On / Moon 1.5 Akira page 2 Canceled Nintendo treasures: You will never be able to play these titles, page 2 2.1 Dream: Land of Giants 2.2 Kid Kirby 2.3 64 Wars 2.4 Metaforce / Action Adventure 2.5 Winter Page 3 Image gallery for "Canceled Nintendo treasures: You will never…. Aufklappen Both the website unseen64.net and the booklet that the authors published served as the basis for the article. We can do that Tome Video Games you will never play recommend to everyone who is interested in obscure and almost forgotten game ideas! We have picked out some of the most exciting candidates for you and describe what everything could have been, you can find much more at the sources mentioned. The illustrations turned out to be difficult, in some cases we had to fall back on images of similar games - but this is stated in the accompanying text.

Recommended editorial content At this point you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. We hope you enjoy your tour of video game history, which has almost never been written. The older Nintendo platforms will start, then we'll keep working our way!

Donkey Kong's Fun with Music

The first track we take a closer look at is Donkey Kong no Ongaku Asobi , or Donkey Kong's Fun with Music, as it should have been called in English. We only know that this game existed from exactly one Japanese article on the subject from 1983. It describes what was behind the project that was in the works at Nintendo EAD - the publisher's largest in-house development department at the time. In the style of the educational game Donkey Kong Jr. Math, an educational arithmetic game from 1983, children should be introduced to music here. That happened in two modes: Music Quiz and Donkey Band. In Music Quiz, players should replay the notes Donkey Kong is playing on the bass on a huge keyboard. Both a two-player and a solo mode were supported. What was hidden behind Donkey Band can only be speculated on the basis of a blurred screenshot - it was probably a kind of music editor, similar to that in Mario Paint or many years later in the failed game project Wii Music.

Source: Nintendo Source: Nintendo Why Donkey Kong's Fun with Music was never completed is unknown, but it may be because the math game was poorly received. Nintendo's educational game series should once contain three games: Number one was Donkey Kong Jr. Math, the second was an English educational game with Popeye, the third was never named and discontinued. It is quite possible that it was Fun with Music. Donkey Kong Jr. Math is available through the Virtual Console on Wii if you want to check out a close relative of the discontinued game and one of the worst Donkey Kong games of all time.

Seiken Densetsu : The Emergence of Excalibur

Seiken Densetsu? You know that! Right, behind it is the series Secret of Mana, but the name was previously intended as a title for an action-RPG that was never released. Seiken Densetsu: The Emergence of Excalibur was an action role-playing game that was to be released for the Famicom Disc System in 1987. This hardware upgrade for the NES never appeared outside of Japan. In an interview, an ex-Squaresoft employee revealed the reasons why Seiken Densetsu was never completed: On the one hand, it was an extensive project, split over five discs, so a significant investment of time and money for a platform that wasn't particularly common. To make matters worse, the company's management did not take a liking to Seiken Densetsu. And so it happened that the title was discontinued despite already started advertising!

Source: Moby Games / Square Enix Source: Moby Games / Square Enix Source: Moby Games / Square Enix In an information letter, Squaresoft contacted pre-orderers, offered a reimbursement of the price and referred as an alternative to another, new RPG, which should see the light of day soon: a little game called Final Fantasy. What has become of it ... however, Seiken Densetsu already had features that appeared in the first published Secret of Mana from 1991, although there is nothing in common in terms of content. Then why the same name for both projects? Maybe to save the money for registering a new trademark. In any case, in the unpublished Seiken Densetsu, you choose four companions from eight different characters who will take you on the adventure. They all have different characteristics, fearful fellows may flee from fights!

The plot follows a young man who goes in search of the legendary Excalibur sword in order to defeat the demonic villain Vargas. With a structure of the upper world, cities and dungeons, the first Seiken Densetsu is very similar to its genre colleagues. Since you could already pre-order the game and articles about it were published in Japan, you know a lot about the structure and the characters. We consider it very unlikely that the concept will be taken up again in the future - many other brands occupy the "niche". We will probably never look for Excalibur if code for the game does not suddenly appear somewhere.

Jet Force Gemini

The action space adventure Jet Force Gemini by Rare experienced its heyday on the N64 great successes. As the world only found out in 2009, there were not only plans to port the title to the handheld, no, the implementation was even completely completed. Jet Force Gemini for the GBC was never officially announced, which is why information about the game only came to light through a collector. He bought the completely playable prototype of the game from an anonymous source - possibly from an ex-employee of Bits Studios, which had been dissolved a year earlier - and posted screenshots of it on the Internet. However, since he never made the prototype available to the general public, it remains unclear how many changes were made to the gameplay and whether the plot is identical to the original.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external content from [PLATTFORM ]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. One thing is certain: The trio also shoots themselves through numerous insects on the Game Boy, only this was done from the iso perspective. A former Rare developer, who also worked on the N64 version of Jet Force Gemini, said: "JFG for the Game Boy was the only instance I remember doing Rare development work at another studio The last time I saw the game it was almost done. I don't know what happened to it. " A good question to which there is no specific answer - the sales of the Game Boy versions of other rare games may not have been satisfactory.

Fall-On / Moon

The inspiration for fall-on were the Metroid games. A small team at Acclaim worked on the adventure in which you solve puzzles as an astronaut with a controllable drone in a spacious cave. The game was suspended for unknown reasons, but fortunately got a second chance in a slightly different form. An ex-employee from the Acclaim team moved to Studio Renegade Kid and incorporated ideas and concepts from Fall-On into the adventure Moon, which was released for the Nintendo DS in 2009.

Source: Renegade Kid Source: Jools Watsham It wasn't a side-view adventure, but that was because the Renegade Kid decided to use the engine that was used in their previous work, Dementium: The Ward. Otherwise there are striking similarities: In Moon, for example, a drone is available to help you. Fall-On came to light through the aforementioned developer Jools Watsham, who provided insights into the history of the unreleased game on his YouTube channel and provided pictures from the prototype of Fall-On!

Akira

Akira is one of those animated films that you should have seen - groundbreaking, ambitious, technically still incomparably impressive today. No wonder that games based on manga and film templates were planned. Some of them appeared (only in Japan), but quite a number of them never saw the light of day. This happened for the following reason: After the head of Black Pearl Software had seen the dubbed version of Akira in 1989 and was enthusiastic, he absolutely wanted to produce games for templates and turned to the production company Kodansha. Otomo, the creator of the mango template, was impressed by the American's élan and gave his blessing. Games should be created for several platforms, including SNES, Game Gear, Game Boy and Genesis.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external content from [PLATFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. Each title was transferred to a different studio, which is why the concepts in the end, apart from the brand, did not have so much in common. On the SNES, for example, the hero Kaneda selected various locations on a map, to which one then jetted on the iconic motorcycle and messed up opponents in the side view. The design of the bosses should be comparable to the visual opulence of the anime template. The version for Genesis, on the other hand, switched between genres, had first-person shooter sequences and chases on two-wheeled vehicles. In the end, none of the scheduled Akira games appeared. The head of Black Pearl transferred the rights to THQ, with further development (some of the games were about 30 percent complete) there were disagreements with the project manager, other, more important work intervened, developers left the studios and so on. Akira was ahead of his time, and a game implementation with limited resources would probably not have done justice to the template anyway.

Our big report continues on the next page!

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