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Madness: House of Fun is a cancelled platform game based around the Ska music group with the same name, that was in development by Gremlin Graphics for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. The project was a “remake” of the original Gremlin’s Amiga title “Harlequin”, with new graphic, characters and Madness’ music. As Robert Hazelby (webmaster of Madness Information Service Online, a fan site of the group) wrote on the Total Madness mailing list:

I’m not sure if the band were actually going to be featured in the game as Gremlin devised some strange character (who’s name escapes me at the moment) who the player would control. In the background, it was planned that some awful 6 channel Yamaha sound-chip induced ditties would be playing away.
Unfortunately the bottom dropped out of the console market and Gremlin decided to can the Madness computer game and so it was never released. Ex MML subscriber Jacco Van’t Reit (did I spell that correctly) did offer his services with regards to helping to produce the game after he had worked on previous projects for the Gremlin team but this unfortunately didn’t happen.
Track down an Amiga and a copy of Harlequin to see how your Madness game would have played.

Thanks to Celine and Rod_Wod we were able to preserve many screens of Madness: House of Fun, that were found in some old magazines (as Mean Machine #17, Mega Force #17).

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Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Shadow Stalker [SNES – Cancelled]

monokoma

05-03-2010

2 Comments

Shadow Stalker is a cancelled 2D side scrolling action game that was in development in 1993 by Athena for the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom. From the few screens preserved in the gallery below (scanned from Console Plus #24, EGM #51 and Game Power #25), we can assume that the game was probably going to play similar to Shinobi / Ninja Gaiden, but with lots of huge robots and other mechanical enemies.

Thanks to Alex and Celine for the contributions!

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Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Kirby’s Adventure [NES – Beta / Unused]

U64 Staff & Contributors

01-03-2010

3 Comments

Kirby’s Adventure is a platform game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the NES in 1992 (Japan) and 1993 (USA andEurope). As we can read at Wiki Rusted Logic, the game features a great amount of debug rooms and unused content, some of which would end up in future Kirby games.

Miniboss test rooms. Not just any minibosses though — these rooms have the faster, more difficult versions of Bugzzy, Poppy Bros. Sr., Rolling Turtle, and Mr. Tick Tock that are found in stage 7-2’s hidden route.
Rooms 0142-0144: These rooms, however, weren’t used. Meta Knight battles for the layouts of rooms #142 & #144 still exist in the game, but not for room #143.
Room 0145: A pretty cool cannon puzzle that’s only accessible from the debug room. To get the cannon to fire, you have to pound in the stake with the Hammer or Stone abilities, then quickly inhale the Laser Ball to get the Laser ability. Next, quickly fire a laser at the slope at the bottom before the ice block appears to block you, then hop into the cannon. It’s tricky to get it timed right, but it does work.
Unused Ability : these tiles of a tiny Kirby are found in sprite bank 8C, along with the graphics for the Mike and Ball abilities. These graphics were possibly used for an ability that no longer exists in the game. The oddly sized Kirby would have been used for a shrinking animation […] This Mini ability might have been replaced with the UFO power [..] 12 years later, this ability would finally be implemented in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. However, in that game, you can’t slide while using this power.

Also, CrashAndSonicChao found the lost Mini Kirby sprites thanks to a sprite editor:

Thanks to ORKAL‘s Youtube Channel we can see an interesing video that shows many of the unused content.

You can find more about the Kirby series in the WiKirby!

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Videos:

Microsoft, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Slipshod [PS2/XBOX – Cancelled]

monokoma

19-02-2010

No Comments

Slipshod is a cancelled platform game that was in development by Electronic Arts in 2001, for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. It was supposed to launch a new platform franchise for EA (something like Crash Bandicoot or Ratchet & Clank), but sadly after some years of development, they decided to disband the team and kill the game.

One of the levels was finished and playable, but it was too easy and not much fun to play. The Slipshod team put a lot of time and effort into the artwork and the graphic engine but they did not have enough time to develope the actual game play.

The main character design and background evolved a lot during the development: named “‘Buggy”, he was originally meant to be a pizza delivery bug in a “human-sized” world, who rode a segway and was trying to save his girlfriend. After 2 years of work, EA decided to change the whole game from scratch. In another concept “Buggy” was more like a ninja bug, who had to collect scrolls. One of the last changes before the cancellation put Buggy in a “bug-sized” world, having the whole game to take place in a tree stump.

After the target of the project was changed again to create the new “bug-scaled” world, rumors of the cancellation started to pass inside the dev-team and soon after they were all reassigned to different games. EA decided that they had already put too much time and money into the development of Slipshod, and to start over would have been too cost prohibitive.

Slipshod had the potential to be a fun game, but sadly the continuous changes of perspectives and scenario ended up killing the project.

Thanks a lot to Hey Hey for the contribution and to Tyler for his help to preserve info and media from this lost game!

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Video (from 1:50 to 2:30):

Playstation, Sony

Jalapeno Harry [PSX – Cancelled]

monokoma

13-02-2010

5 Comments

Jalapeno Harry is a cancelled platform game that was in development by Sony in 1997 / 1998 for the original Playstation. There is not much information available on this unreleased project, except some concept artwork that shows what the game would have looked like. We can read some more info about Jalapeno in this quote by Jason Rubin on IGN:

Sony even started to mess around with its own, internal platformer based on the success of Crash. “Because Universal owned Crash, before Sony bought Naughty Dog, Sony thought that in case Crash went away, they needed to have an engine that could do what we were doing,” Rubin said, “and they actually internally started working on a ‘Crash Killer,’ they called it, that was eventually Harry Jalapeno, believe it or not.”

Maybe Sony decided to stop the work on Jalapeno Harry as Naughty Dog and Universal made the Crash Bandicoot series a Playstation 1 exclusive and they did not need to spend money on another platform brand.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution and to Sir_Brando for the english corrections!

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