Unseen News

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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Some interesting NES / SNES protos on eBay!

In the eBay store of Sample_Seller there are currently on sale a lot of beta / unreleased NES & SNES games, some of which might not be preserved yet. If you are one of the lucky collectors that will be able to win some of those, please share some screens or videos later! They will be really appreciated :) You can check the list of prototypes on sale in here.

Update: more protos auctions – Burai Fighterr [Sample / proto]

 

Unseen Changes: Alex Kidd vs Anmitsu Hime

<< More Changes

Anmitsu Hime for the Master System was a tie-in of an old anime of the same name. When the game was released in america, SEGA decided to change the title to Alex Kidd High Tech World. The storyline was completely rewritten and it became autocelebratory (Alex Kidd wants to try the new Sega Arcade in town), the characters redesigned (oddly enough, they weren’t westernized) , but the slow,puzzle-heavy gameplay was left exactly the same.

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Title Screen.

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Alex at beginning of the game.

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You can save and resume your game.

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High Tech World’s new story.

[Article by yota]

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<< More Changes 

[New Unseen Interview] Yakumo from Segagagadomain

If you are used to the beta & cancelled games communities, you probably know already Yakumo and his Segagaga Domain website. SD is another great place to find informations about obscure games, especially japanese and SEGA ones: in there you can even see a collection of videos from unseen Saturn and Dreamcast games. In this new Unseen Interview we have questioned Yakumo, to know better the mind under Segagaga Domain, learn about the japanese gamer’s life and his toughts about the unseen gaming world. >> Read the full interview

 

Maintenance? What happened to U64?

As you have probably noticed, we had some problems with the U64 server in the last few days: what happened? Well, when Unseen 64 was created in 2001, we used a slow, limited but free web-server. Things have changed and we have grown bigger and bigger over all these years.

About a year ago we decided to upgrade the site and pay for a private web-server to be able to organize better all these unseen stuff.  But wow.. that thing costs a lot.. and as many more people started to visit U64, even the current server is not able to keep up with the bandwidth usage! It’s slower and slower.. so we need to change the server again.. to find a faster one.. and that means.. a more expensive one.

We are in the middle of the site transfer from the current server to the new one,  but while we were working on it, something went wrong and everything broke up.. so we had to close down U64 for a couple of days to fix it.  Now it seems that the site is working again, there are still some problems (the comments and the forums are currently disabled) but everything should be fine for the next week.

Now, the only problem that remains is.. we need to rise enough money to pay for the server for the next year.  Not much money is generated from those site ADS so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves. We know that not many people could be interested to donate money for a “stupid gaming site” like U64, so we though to.. open a cafepress shop. In there you can buy some U64 swag for yourself or for your friends.. and we can get some money from your shopping spree. You can even buy your favourite games through our Playasia banners if you want. But for the few, real unseen-geeks that would like to donate their pure love, we still accept contributions through PayPal. You can just donate how much or little you want. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the site.

And that’s all. Thank you for even reading this :)

With love, the U64 Staff.

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