Mother 3 was going to be a Nintendo 64 sequel of the SNES RPG know as Earthbound. It was, however, cancelled in 2000, but later the game resurfaced on the GBA and it was officially released in 2006. Now that the english fan-translation of Mother 3 is out, we can finally trying to analyze the old beta with the help of the few informations we have in English. >> Read the full story
A little introduction
[Article written by Yota]
Mother 3 was going to be a Nintendo 64’s sequel of the SNES RPG know as Earthbound. It was, however, cancelled in 2000, but later the game resurfaced on the GBA and it was officially released in 2006. Now that the english fan-translation of Mother 3 is out, we can finally try to analyze the old beta with the help of the few informations we have in English. (Itoi posted some notes about the cancellation of Mother 64 on his japanese site, but unfortunately only two pages have been translated by Tomato.They can be found here).
It seems that Mother 3 was already scheduled for the SNES even before the release of Earthbound in America, but the development was quickly switched to the 64DD, and the game was officially announced only in 1996. We don’t know much about the Disk Drive version, but, like Zelda URA, it would have used all of the add-on features, and it would have been compatible with Mario Artist. Also, according to Dream 64, the original story was originally intended to cover ten years of the characters life.
In 1998 Nintendo said that the 64DD Mother 3 was going to be ported on a cartridge, with an F-zero-like expansion scheduled for later. The cart version had twelve chapters, more characters, more locations (like a jungle and a river that you can see in a screenshot), but the main narrative was roughly the same as the GBA version, only more mature. Flint, Claus and Lucas probably had a bigger role in the first chapters compared to the final version.
On the MTV Gameblog we can find the confirmation about the cancellation of the Heroes videogame, a title based on the TV serie that was in development at Ubisoft for the current generation consoles: “The rights to the ‘Heroes’ video game have reverted back to NBC Universal. Ubisoft will no longer produce a video game based on the TV series. The game was officially announced in July 2007 and slated to release in late 2008. Ubisoft’s announcement follows NBC’s firing of the program’s executive producers, reported by Variety this past weekend.” No screens or videos were released before the cancellation, but maybe some media will be leaked in the future.
Fighting Force is beat ’em up developed by Core Design that was released for the PlayStation, PC and Nintendo 64 in 1997. A Saturn version was in development too, but it was later cancelled. Now, thanks to Hidden Palace and its community, an aplha of the Saturn version is leaked to the public! It seems that the project was initially named “Judgement Force” and it was meant to be a new game in the Streets of Rage saga. I have never played Fighting Force, so i dont know if this proto has some differences from the final version, maybe someone knows? You can download Judgement Force at Hidden Palace.
Videos (By Madroms):
In the Youtube Channel of runehero124 there’s a video from a nice Bomberman Hero test-map. From the description we read that: “This code was originally discovered by Icy Guy from the RareWitchProject forums. So give him full credit. I rediscovered it a couple years later, but noticed that it had been found before.”
From an interview at GDRI we found out the design of Bomberman Hero is an adaption of the concepts for the cancelled Ultra Genjin:
GDRI: What happened with Ultra Genjin [N64]?
Ultra Genjin was being planned during the game industry’s transition from 2D to 3D games. I studied the practical aspects of this quite a bit, but I think that nobody really knew what should be done with games at the time. As a result of trial and error, we were able to adapt the design for Ultra Genjin to Bomberman Hero.
A little more information about Ultra PC Genjin directly from Shouichi Yoshikawa site:
ULTRA PRIMITIVE MAN (UNFINISHED)
PLATFORM N64/ 32M ROM (HUDSON/ Project stop )
MY TERM JUNE 1995. to DEC. 1995.
MY CHARGE Planning & 3D Graphic tool mastering
CONTENT After the project stop, this planning was transfered to “BOMBERMAN HERO”
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
Video: