New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Beta “Boo Key” found in Mario 64

In a screen of Mario 64 Beta there was a strange item inside a Big Boo:

mario64bookey.jpg

It was difficult to understand what it was, but the mystery behind this item was cleared a bit with the find of the same exact 3D model still in the game: thanks to Toad’s Tool 64, we can change the ID of some items to show up an unused small Key, the same one that was inside Boo in that old image! Dudaw12 has made a video with the ghost key that we can see in his YT channel:

Now the question is: what kind of use had this small key? Why we had to take it from Big Boo in the Mario 64 beta? Could it had some kind of use in the ghost mansion? Probably we’ll never know..

More Sonic Triple Trouble-Chaos 2 beta stuff

Martin Konrad has found more beta stuff in his collection of old gaming magazines: in these scans we can see more screens from an early version of Sonic Triple Trouble/Chaos 2 for the GameGear. Martin says that “There is some kind of 3D bonus levels which is not used in the final game and a couple of scenes with Nack/Fang which were removed.”

sonicttscan01.jpg

“Another scan shows a level in the first world, but the level layout is different from the final version”. You can check all these beta-screens and more in our Sonic Triple Trouble / Chaos 2 beta archive. Thanks a lot to Martin Konrad for the contribution!

Update: The real Landstalker beta-stuff

Some time ago we had a discussion about a misterious bath scene that was found in the american version of Landstalker with the help of some hack-codes, but thanks to Ryu-Ya we found out that the scene was accessible without codes in the japanese version of the game. The bath-stuff was not beta, just censorship, but Ryu-Ya is the webmaster of Landsavior, a site about codes and hacks for Landstalker, and it seems that hidden in the game there were really some beta contents: a series of enemies and items that are not used in the final version, neither the japanese or the american one. We have added these unused sprites in the Landstalker page archive, check them out! Thanks a lot to Ryu-Ya for this contribution :)

Battletoads [GBA – Proto / Cancelled]

Battletoads is a video game by Rare Ltd. created to rival the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. The first game was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991 and was followed up with sequels released over the ensuing years for GameBoy, SNES, Megadrive / Genesis and Arcade. [Info from Wikipedia] A proto for a cancelled GBA version of Battletoads was discovered in the collection of cancelled RARE games that transparentjinjo has uploaded on his Youtube Channel.

The game was in development only for a few weeks, and everything from character animations and enemy AI to sound effects is a placeholder.

The character design was the result of merging the sometimes conflicting ideas of the original Battletoads artists, who were now in director or lead positions on other teams.

Even the main game design was not fixed at that point. Team instructions ranged from “make a shiny clone of the NES version” to “do whatever you think is best” to “everything cool will have to wait for an Xbox version”.

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