1 Hour of Lost Nintendo Games

many lost video games have been documented in recent years this kind of documentation is incredibly important for the preservation of video game history but did all of these lost games actually exist we've decided to delve into the history of three lost Nintendo games and see if they truly are a lost video game or perhaps just a rumor or misunderstanding that got out of hand so without further Ado let's get into the games according to IGN a game titled Animal Crossing 2 was announced in a Japanese magazine in the early 2000s after the first game's release it was planned to hit the GameCube but ended up being canceled this isn't the only place with details about Animal Crossing 2 though the Lost media archive the Animal Crossing Wiki game facts and lots of other websites and YouTube videos Chronicle what they call an unreleased GameCube game and a lost sequel but while investigating Animal Crossing 2 some of the info we found just didn't seem right most of these websites and YouTubers show two screenshots from The Game's beta but none of them cite a source for those screenshots using reverse image search we've found the first screenshot is actually from Nintendo's official Japanese website and in reality it's a screenshot of the original Nintendo 64 game that only released in Japan the second screenshot was first published on a French gaming site called game cult in June 2002 and also appears on Nintendo's official Italian website for Animal Crossing 1 on GameCube in other words the only two screenshots of this supposed lost sequel are actually screenshots of the first game another piece of evidence often shared is this article on a fan site called gamecubicle published on Christmas Eve 2002 it says Japanese magazine famitsu published a list of Nintendo games scheduled to launch in 2003 one of which is Animal Crossing 2. we couldn't find that exact issue of famitsu but we really didn't need to because we found a Japanese article published the exact same day Christmas Eve 2002 they also reposted famatsu's report of Animal Crossing 2 getting announced for GameCube but it says both games titles are tentative and actually there was an animal crossing game released in 2003 called animal forest e plus let's do a quick historical recap for folks unfamiliar with the series origins in Japan the first game was called animal forest and released on Nintendo 64. it was later ported to GameCube with some enhancements which was called animal forest plus then that game eventually got localized for America as Animal Crossing and had lots of new text and even holidays added so it makes sense to Americans Nintendo was so impressed with the localization they decided to localize that version back into Japanese and call it animal forest e plus which means there were actually three different versions of the original game released in Japan animal forest animal forest plus and animal forest e-plus and it's that last version that released in 2003 so famitsu magazine didn't actually announce a sequel they were announcing e-plus which at the time was tentatively titled animal forest 2 IGN page for Animal Crossing 2 says it was announced in a Japanese magazine they don't say witch magazine but it's probably safe to assume they mean famitsu there's lots of opinions and speculation out there but the famitsu announcement and two screenshots are the only sources ever cited and they're all pretty easily disproven in fact if you look on the back end of the Animal Crossing Wiki most of the Wiki's contributors believe it's fake and are saying the Animal Crossing 2 page should be deleted during our research we also spent some time Googling around in Japanese and we couldn't find any Japanese fans talking about Animal Crossing too so it seems this whole idea of an unreleased GameCube game was all just a misunderstanding created by English-speaking fans who didn't know what they were seeing so with all cited evidence proven false we deem Animal Crossing 2 to be fake next up is f-zero for Virtual Boy a game that some fans call G zero and others refer to as zero Racers according to a number of websites including the Lost media Wiki on scene 64 and couple of f-zero wikis zero Racers was only shown to the public once and that was at E3 1996 but we couldn't find any evidence that the game ever made an appearance we watched old footage read old magazines and even spoke to some gaming journalists and one Nintendo staffer who were there but absolutely no one saw it at E3 1996 so we reached out to Chris Radke the guy who founded Planet Virtual Boy all the way back in 1999 and still runs it to this day he told us in the early days of documenting the virtual boy we believed that zero Racers had been shown at E3 1996 and at one point that info was on planet Virtual Boy but nowadays we know that the game has never been shown at any trade show and strangely it was never covered in any Japanese magazines no video footage of zero Racers exist to my knowledge he told us there's a couple Homebrew games hosted on his site formula V and elevated speed which are about as close as we're ever gonna get to seeing Zero racers in action truth is zero Racers was only ever seen in two issues of Nintendo Power Magazine the July 1996 issue with this tiny preview and the August 1996 issue with this much larger preview taking up two full pages with help from art of Nintendo Power we got clearer and higher resolution scans of these magazines than what was available anywhere on the internet so you can actually read the tiny text for the first time those are the screenshots you'll be seeing throughout this video we should note that a few other magazines from that time period also mentioned G zero but their information and screenshots were just lifted from Nintendo power so all screenshots we're using here are directly from the original the unfortunate truth is that no one's ever seen zero Racers Gameplay at least no one outside Nintendo so With a Little Help From Planet Virtual Boy we got in touch with Jim warnell a localizer who worked at Nintendo of America for almost two decades after exchanging a few emails we had an hour-long Zoom call so Jim could share his story he told us as an associate producer I wrote screen text manual and packaged text oversaw the debug and approval process liaised with NCL worked with marketing and advertising Etc anything that had to do with the North American launch of a game was my responsibility G zero later known as zero Racers was on my list of projects zero Racers was done we had a complete manual package and label done for the game it went through lot check it had an ESRB rating it was complete he also said the game's title was changed from g0 to zero Racers late in development to avoid confusion with f-zero zero Racers wasn't a subtitle it was the game's full title because it wasn't a direct sequel to the SNES original it was actually a spin-off presumably the G and G zero and the zero and zero Racers are both references to gravity since instead of cars this game had spaceships and all 15 tracks were made of tunnels where you can fly in all four directions as far as how it sounded Jim says from what I can recall it was like f-zero in a tube it wasn't bleep and bloopy it was very tin and metallic lucky there wasn't background music from what I can remember Nintendo power's preview shows four ships the Falcon Stingray goose and the origami but it never revealed who was inside According to Jim the four Racers were Captain Falcon Jody Summer James Macleod and an alien that he can't say with 100 certainty but he's pretty sure was Pico who piloted the wild goose in the original game Jody summer wasn't in the previous game but eventually made her way into f0x on N64 the same can be said for James McLeod the human character clearly modeled after the father of fox McLeod from Star Fox Jim said he didn't have to localize much text for the game itself as it was a pretty straightforward racer but there was some story text in the game's manual just like the SNES original Jim also told us just how extreme the testing process was back in the 90s saying when they were testing people out for Virtual Boy they had us go through this did you ever see the movie Clockwork Orange the scene where the person's pinned down in the chair and they got their eyelids open that was kind of like what Virtual Boy testing was like they would dilate our pupils they would have us sit with our heads in this Vice type thing and they would shine light in our pupils they would have these plastic rods they would have them just barely touching our eyes and they would say okay no matter what don't blink for a minute they put us under just the most bizarre tests just to make sure I guess to make sure the thing was safe to use they would blow air into our eyes they would have us play a virtual boy test kit for 10 to 15 minutes then we'd have to rest then they dilate our eyes again two or three rounds of these just bizarre inhumane torture tests just to make sure this thing wouldn't kill me or blind me or whatever but um yeah it was interesting it was a pretty harrowing experience but fortunately things turned out pretty well for Jim since he got to voice the announcer in the series next game f0x [Applause] zero Racers was completely finished localized into English had its packaging and manual and was rated E for Everyone by the ESRB but Nintendo canceled it along with two other complete games at the very last minute which Jim attributes to probably wanting to leave the virtual boy behind and focus Gamer's attention on the upcoming Nintendo 64. zero Racers wasn't found in the recent Nintendo Giga leaks but Jim's confident Nintendo still has it in a vault somewhere and could bring it back anytime that's probably never gonna happen but who knows maybe we'll see it on Nintendo switch online someday so with first-hand testimony from Nintendo's localizer and an official rating from the ESRB we rate zero Racers as 100 real now moving on to this video's next loss game in November 2016 Eurogamer reported the next Pokemon game would release on switch the following year and that it would be an enhanced version of sun and moon codenamed Pokemon stars the article's author eurogamers Deputy editor Tom Phillips claimed to have several sources for the story and at least one was saying the switch Edition would add new Pokemon fans were excited to hear about the jump to an HD console and even though it was never stated explicitly by Eurogamer most assumed Stars would bump up the resolution to at least 720p some fans even canceled their plans to buy sun and moon on 3DS and just waited for stars instead hype continued to build over the next few months especially when the Pokemon company announced a new campaign called look upon the Stars which saw the release of an entire line of stars-themed merchandise series director junichi Masuda made a tweet starting with the words Pokemon stars that some fans interpreted as a teaser for things to come anticipation peaked in mid-2017 when Amazon UK began selling pre-orders for Pokemon stars it seemed to just be a placeholder as there was no box art and the release date was January 2030 but that didn't stop it from climbing the sales charts and reaching number 87 on Amazon's best sellers list for PC and video games even when Ultra sun and moon were announced in June the Pokemon company's official website described the games as eventually coming to the switch they quickly deleted the switch reference and put out a statement saying it was just a clerical error but some fans believed the slip up was Nintendo accidentally revealing Stars earlier than intended Ultra sun and moon were after all very similar to how Eurogamer described Pokemon stars an expansion of sun and moon released in Holiday 2017 with a few new Pokemon the main difference was that there were two games instead of one and it was on the 3DS so to some a switch release still seemed likely But as time passed it eventually became clear that Pokemon stars was never coming one year after his original 2016 article eurogamers Tom Phillips returned with a post-mortem titled so what happened with Pokemon stars long story short he said his sources indicated that star's cancellation was primarily a casualty of Nintendo's business strategy after the fail failure of the Wii U Nintendo was originally planning to release three of their biggest IP for switch year one Zelda Mario and Pokemon but plans changed after the switch exploded in popularity and the problem wasn't that Nintendo couldn't sell them it was that they were selling out of them they couldn't even make enough switches to keep up with demand it was no longer necessary to deploy Pokemon as a Fail-Safe so instead Ultra sun and moon and a few other big titles like Metroid Samus returns were released throughout 2017 to keep the 3DS on life support in case the switch couldn't financially carry the company all on its own Nintendo's official position was that both consoles would continue to co-exist and the switch wasn't meant as a replacement for the 3DS that's pretty much always been their public position on new consoles like when they promoted the DS as a third pillar rather than a replacement for the Game Boy Advance Eurogamer also said an upres 3DS Port selling for sixty dollars could have made the switch look bad in its first year and risking that exception was another factor that led to stars getting canceled understandably a few fans were pessimistic about eurogamers reporting with some even accusing Eurogamer of just making it all up for clicks the most prominent critic was Joe Merrick the webmaster of Pokemon fan site Serebii who would later describe eurogamer's reporting as BS and a fake rumor and argue with Tom Phillips in his article's comments section now with almost five years hindsight we talked to Joe and asked what he makes of the rumor he told us he thought sun and moon might have been ported to switch purely for the sake of testing and was never meant to become an actual product for sale maybe someone at Nintendo saw it running on switch in HD got the wrong idea and leaked it to Eurogamer or maybe Joe says Tom Source just made it all up we'd heard both theories before and we'd already been in talks with Phillips during this video's production so he asked if he thinks that might have been what happened he flatly denied both possibilities reiterating that Eurogamer doesn't run stories based on a sing single source and the typical requirement is three sources at minimum he wouldn't reveal who his sources were of course but he did say they were in professional positions where mistaking a test port for an actual game would have been impossible to be fair to Tom the guy has a pretty good track record when it comes to his reporting he was the first to report on the switch's design and internal Hardware specifications almost three months before they were officially revealed by Nintendo he was also the first to report on the Super NES classic Diablo 3 on switch and several other games long before they were announced not everything he's written about made their way onto store shelves like an English localization of Mother 3 but suffice it to say there are a lot of clout Chasers in the gaming industry with fake Insider info but Tom isn't one of them he told us he stands by his post-mortem on Pokemon stars and for the record reiterated that the Pokemon company did originally plan to release an alola based game on switch codenamed stars in Holiday 2017 looking back on Tom's original expose there's a few details worth re-examining with the benefit of hindsight the first is that his sources reported that sun moon and stars were all developed simultaneously although work on Stars was paused at one point so game free could focus on finishing up the 3DS titles for their holiday release date we'd like to point out that gen 7 removed a lot of the bottom screen functionality and touch screen features that were used in Gen 6 like the dexnav and player search system sun and moon did use Touch features for mechanics like Pokemon refresh but touch could have easily gotten replaced with motion controls which is exactly what gamefreak did for let's go Pikachu and Eevee if they thought gen 7 would eventually make its way to switch that would explain why a lot of those bottom screen and touch features didn't make their way into sun and moon which mostly just use the bottom screen for map and menu navigation it's also worth noting that Gen 6 offered stereoscopic 3D for Pokemon battles but sun and moon didn't Tom told us his info on Stars was accurate but noted that by the time the details got to him then out to the public that info may have already been outdated and game freak's plans might have changed before his article was even published in a later interview sun and Moon's director shigaru amori said the idea for the ultra games started late in Sun and Moon's development so around mid to late 2016 and in more interviews in the years that followed omori and junichi Masuda revealed that let's go Pikachu and Evie and sword and shield entered production at around the same time when sun and moon were wrapping up in 2016. in other words the development on all three pairs of games began around the same time information about Pokemon stars made its way to Eurogamer all of that going down in a short window in 2016 certainly doesn't prove stars ever existed but it does indicate that game freak's plans were being formed solidified and possibly changed around at the time in an attempt to corroborate Tom's reporting we reached out to about 50 of the developers who worked on sun and moon but unfortunately we were rebuffed at every turn Pokemon keeps their p people on a pretty tight lockdown more so even than Nintendo so ndas prevented us from getting a single scrap of info either confirming or denying that Pokemon stars ever existed there was a lot of smoke but we can't say conclusively whether or not there was ever a fire so we're gonna have to rate this one as still just a rumor as far as we're concerned the case is still open but if anyone out there has first-hand knowledge of Pokemon stars we ask that you please reach out to us on Twitter maybe we can work something out mutually beneficial we'll keep digging around for info and hopefully someday we can make a follow-up video and finally put the rumor to rest one way or another we never work on anything even pitched anything that would be similar to like breath of the wild or Ocarina of Time Wind Waker we never worked on a game of that format we never worked on anything that could be called a traditional Zelda in 2008 a few months after Retro Studios released Metroid Prime 3 rumors started to spread that their next project was a Zelda game for Wii interviewers spotted highly in memorabilia hanging on the walls of retro HQ and fans were hyped for what a western Zelda made in Texas might look like retrode actually worked on a GameCube launch title called ravenblade they said was going to be like Ocarina of Time with some twists now almost a decade later hopes were high for Retro's wheat project but excitement faded as years passed without any official announcements or leaks in 2012 IGN asked series Creator Shigeru Miyamoto if there was any truth to the rumor Miyamoto said in terms of them working on a Zelda it's not out of the question certainly for them to work on an entire Zelda game amongst themselves but they're too busy for that sort of thing right now it would probably require me to be involved to a great extent as well so I would have to get over there quite a bit too I'd probably have to live in Texas Retro's next game was Donkey Kong Country Returns and after a while fans forgot about the Zelda rumors well until 2020 that is when Metroid fans site shine sparkers noticed some of the game's concept art hiding in plain sight over the past couple years a former retro artist Sammy Hall posted over 100 pieces of art on his art station account a social media platform similar to deviantArt the story quickly went viral and apparently realizing he shouldn't have posted that stuff online Sammy immediately deleted all his social media his personal blog and basically went into hiding never to be seen again however we managed to get a hold of him with some internet sleuthing and talked off and on for a couple weeks it was great talking to Sammy but he ultimately declined our interview requests luckily however we were able to grab some info from his old websites before he deleted them a few years ago we were also able to speak with two other retro employees familiar with the project one is Paul tozur one of the game's two programmers I feel the statute of limitations has expired on a lot of this because it's 15 years ago and I'm interested in telling the truth the other person was only willing to speak as an anonymous source we know who this person is and we're able to confirm their identity but we can't share who they are in this video it's a pretty secretive subject and as it turns out retro Zelda project was bigger than you probably thought there's much more than just artwork there was actually a playable prototype with nine months of work put into it by the way make sure to stick around to the end of this video you're in for a mind-blowing surprise about 15 minutes from now we're getting ahead of ourselves though before we get into all the new information we dug up let's start with the art and info that dropped in 2020 we should note that every image used in this video has been digitally upskilled for clarity and will also show the name of all Concepts Dart in the bottom corner we acquired these image names by downloading the concept art directly from sami's art station which are worth some attention because they reveal some clues for example these pieces are called Rhino sketches and this location artworks called Rhino land which suggests they go together with the Rhinos living in or around the city on his now deleted art station Sammy described the concept art as being made for a canceled Zelda project worked on from 2005 to 2008 applying different mediums as well as combinations to explore a wide range of styles it was a fun pre-pre-pre-production origin story of the master sword within the bad ending of Ocarina of Time we were exploring the last male Sheiks after a genocidal ethnic cleansing Journey transforming into the master sword all while the dark Gerudo were giving their 100 Year birth to Ganon for folks unfamiliar with Zelda's three timelines ocarina's bad ending refers to the timeline that occurs if link is defeated by Ganon that's when this game would have taken place by the way fans often wonder how the Gerudo race continues to exist if there's only one male born every hundred years ocarina's script director toru Asawa answered that question in a Japanese magazine we translated For an upcoming gurus Zelda video on this channel but it's worth sharing here he said the Gerudo Women Marry men from other tribes and it's not uncommon for them to kidnap men just for that purpose the children born from these interracial marriages always have features of a pure Gerudo and as long as men remain captivated by gerudo's exotic charms their bloodline Will Never Fade All The Offspring are daughters except one son born each Century in addition to the shika and Gerudo Retro's artwork also shows some new variants of old races like Deku Warriors as well as the dark velu race which seems to be a corrupted version of the Dragon race from Wind Waker there's also some brand new races like this Axolotl inspired creature and a few pieces dedicated to steam Punky clock kids including a clock boy and clock girl weird weird weird stuff is how Sammy described the project but games in the Zelda Universe have very weird stuff these were exploration and tests to exercise a range of potential art directions several population centers can be seen as well like horn town and a connected area called horntown Roots then the bizarrely imagined Rock town like an impressionist painting come to life there's also lightning Town zoom in and you can see some people providing scale and there's flying airships tied to lightning town as well zoom in on this one and you can see what looks like ships bombing a village these are however early Concepts and there's no guarantee they would have made it into the game Sammy wrote highly experimental concept designs and art Direction slinging whatever crap at the wall see what sticks nothing more fun than early Blue Sky pre-production it's fun to see how the game game was taking shape but how serious was retro about actually making it when all this artwork went viral in 2020 fans were wondering if it was a real project or if Sammy was all on his own going nuts with a paintbrush right after his art was discovered but before he disappeared Sani provided a brief statement to IGN he said I doubt many at Nintendo proper saw much of any of this stuff I was mostly put into a room like Milton from Office Space and tasked to brainstorm between other projects we weren't entirely convinced it was a one-man job though Sammy may have downplayed the situation to cover his Retreat so we contacted everyone who worked at retro during this time about 70 people total all the way down to the accountants and janitor almost everyone was either unable or unwilling to talk but we caught a break when one agreed to share details as an anonymous source they told us retro pitched a lot of games over the years including some that fans have never heard about out even as rumors and Truth is most pitches never become games that's just the nature of the industry so he asked would it be fair to say the Zelda spin-off was nothing particularly important that it was never taken too seriously and it was just one of countless ideas that basically went nowhere they took exception to us suggesting retro would half-ass a project especially a huge Nintendo IP they set us straight everything they pitched in Nintendo was taken seriously retro had multiple developers supporting even preliminary takes on every project there was a lot more of the game that was never made public much more than sami's art around the same time we were talking to our source some huge Nintendo leaks happened a lot of the Nintendo 64 development assets beta Sprites and more visual aspects soaked up most of the media coverage but there was also a spreadsheet for internal company use not meant to be seen by folks like us with a list of in-development games Circa late 2005. one of those games was called Project X developed by Retro Studios we went ahead and translated the part around Project X so you can read it the spreadsheet includes some games that did release like Mario Party 8 and Battalion Wars 2. based on outside info these appear to be Other M and Smash Bros brawl which were also completed some of them got canceled though like the Battalion Wars spin-off night Wars and of course Project X the spreadsheet says it was going to be in pre-production at least a few more months and that it's an action game featuring Chic from Zelda Ocarina of Time some of y'all might be thinking wait Chic I thought this game was going to start the last surviving male sheikah we were confused on that point for a while ourselves but what Sammy actually said was it's the origin story of the master sword within the bad ending of Ocarina of Time exploring the last male Sheik's Journey transforming into the master sword it's probably safe to assume male Chic was a typo and he meant the last male sheikah the race impa hails from a lot of news sites that reported the story implied he was the playable character but actually the story focused on the last male sheika's transformation into the master sword but the playable character was Chic it's worth noting that when skyward's sword released six years later it also told the origin story of the master sword and how fee's Spirit was laid to rest inside it that's pretty similar to the plot of Project X so it seems Nintendo repurposed the idea for their own Wii Zelda the league spreadsheet also identifies whose overseeing production back in Japan Nintendo's software Planning and Development production group 3 headed up by kensuke tanabe NPD group 3 oversaw development on classic titles like Paper Mario Thousand-Year Door and Mother 3 as well as games like Mario Strikers Charged Kirby and Metroid Prime 2 and 3. interestingly though they never touched a Zelda game in their entire history in other words we had retro a talented developer who'd never worked on Zelda before being managed by a veteran Nintendo division who'd never overseen a Zelda before Project X was on the road to becoming something completely different to Zelda games of the past our anonymous source told us we never worked on anything even pitched anything that would be similar to breath of the wild Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker we never worked on a game of that format I shouldn't say too much but we never worked on anything that could be called a traditional Zelda we were a little confused were they trying to deny the game ever existed what were they saying exactly I'm just saying we never worked on anything that could be equated to the same type of game as a Zelda as a breath of the wild and so forth we never worked on a game in that format so we asked what the genre was gonna be Sammy Hall's notes said it was set to be an action jrpg so was that the twist that the spin been off was some sort of jrpg maybe turn based our source told us no retro never planned or even pitched anything that could be considered a jrpg we had a long list of questions but most of them they'd only give us vague answers to and he refused to say what Made Project X so non-traditional so we redoubled our efforts to find more team members it took a few months of emails LinkedIn connections contacting the same people that ignored us the first time etc etc we'll spare you the details but long story short we finally got in touch with one of project X's programmers who was willing to speak on the record that someone was Paul tozur who was also a programmer on Metroid Prime 2 and 3. he answered every question our anonymous source wouldn't I see people you know commenting on that concept art on the internet and being like Oh my God retro was working on a Zelda game that would have been so awesome and and like I understand that feeling but what they have to understand is it was not actually a Zelda game at no point was it anything like really anything like Zelda it was uh an experiment gone wrong that happened to be set in the Zelda universe so what was the gameplay actually like Paul said it was badly undercooked like a simplified version of whack-a-mole he was in charge of coding the combat which he describes as Sheik standing in one place unable to move surrounded by a group of enemy wolves which by the way is why there's so much wolf concept art and they jump at you one at a time and you just flick the wiim out to kill them there were four or five wolves maybe six and they would just be in their idle State waiting to pounce at you then they jump one by one and you'd go whack so that's literally all it was just detecting when the players swung the Wii remote if so the wolf dies and if you don't do it correctly you take damage you know for me it comes back to that famous Sid Meier quote a game is a series of interesting decisions so I compare that gameplay to whack-a-mole but the problem is there's actually fewer decisions involved than whack-a-mole because with whack-a-mole you've got all these moles popping up and you've got to prioritize which one do I hit which ones do I ignore which order am I gonna whack these moles in there's actually some thinking involved whereas with Chic it's pure stimulus response so if you don't have that level of interesting decision making you don't really have gameplay he went on to say that the only enemies in the Prototype were wolves but the plan was to add more enemy types if it went into full production to be clear Paul was just programming what he was told to program he didn't get to decide how the combat actually worked that was dictated by Sheik's designers that was another Code Name by the way they called the game Chic but when Paul went to one of the designers and voiced his concerns the designer said this sort of super simplified gameplay was the wave of the future and compared it to Link's crossbow training the other programmer rice Lewis was in charge of the Overworld traversal which was completely separate from the combat Sheik moved around the Overworld then when she got to a point of Interest she was kind of sucked out of the Overworld and into the fight like how it works in a jrpg as for the Overworld traversal itself Paul says it was even messier than the combat he called it quote a hot mess we were kind of in disbelief are you sure this is the same game the artwork is awesome how could the gameplay be so basic the art was never the problem Paul told us the art was great and there was never any question that Retros artists could make anything look brilliant it was the gameplay design that was badly underdeveloped and wasn't reviewed by Retro's other designers like the ones working on the Prime Trilogy collection after a while Paul went to one of his bosses and said hey why are we doing this there's no gameplay here we could do something like Shadow of the Colossus I know all of us love that game why don't we have something where you're fighting huge monsters and you're actually crawling around on their surface Nintendo's never done anything quite like that before and he replied yeah that would be cool but he also refused to change the direction we were heading there were a lot of Shadow of the Colossus fans at retro two of them Andy O'Neal and Marco thrush left retro to create their own Studio blue point games and literally remade Shadow of the Colossus for PlayStation 4. that games currently got a 91 on Metacritic by the way even aegianoma the director and producer of the mainline Zelda series is a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus in 2007 he told German magazine End Zone that it was currently his favorite game made outside Nintendo a Zelda game in that format would have had a lot of potential or even just a traditional Zelda developed by Retro Studios but the problem according to Paul was Retro's leadership whenever anyone put their hand up to say Project X was headed off a cliff they were ignored leadership thought they weren't being team players and they should just put their heads down and do their jobs but Paul points out that part of being a team player is being willing to say hey there's an iceberg we need to turn the ship right away and not just blindly follow orders but unfortunately those warnings fell on death ears and development continued in the same direction pre-pre-pre-production as Sammy put it started in 2005 then after Nintendo green lit the project in mid-2007 Paul and some others were brought on for actual pre-production which lasted nine months up until the Prototype was pitched to Nintendo so how did the pitch go Paul told us Nintendo couldn't really make heads or tails of it their reaction basically boils down to this is seriously what you're proposing really it was immediately rejected that's what I was told but I wasn't there when it happened and I suppose there's a possibility it never actually happened and they decided not to show it to Nintendo Nintendo gave us the green light to make the Prototype but they had zero input or visibility during the nine months of pre-production which is one of the reasons it failed two weeks later Paul resigned from his position at Retro Studios our anonymous source suggested in his vague way of answering questions that the decision to cancel Project X might have also been influenced by Retro's top three developers Mark Puccini Todd Keller and Jack Matthews leaving retro to start their own company Armature Studio they left the same week as the pitch although we heard conflicting reports whether their departure or the failed pitch happened first how much talent was working on Project X well one of the guys who left Mark Puccini was the design lead he'd also been the director of all the Metroid Prime games Todd Keller left too he was the lead artist and art director on the Prime games and he was leading the artwork on this project as well Sammy Hall was working under Todd along with some other artists although Paul can't remember who they all were Vince Jolie was the animation lead the same guy who led animation for Prime 3. there was one more designer but Paul didn't want to identify him and Paul and rice Lewis were the two programmers in total there were at least seven people working on this project but probably a few more Paul can't remember Paul says many on the team including himself thought Project X needed more programmers retro had about a dozen more but they were assigned to other tasks like the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection and another prototype called The Blog game but he reiterated that regardless of how many programmers they had X could have only been saved with fundamental design changes there was a lot of top talent working on the project the potential was huge it could have been an awesome game or who knows maybe a whole side series but the design wasn't up to Snuff and retro leadership refused to change direction as for why we don't really want to point fingers and name names stirring up 8 mobs on Twitter isn't really what this channel is about and our sources don't want that either so to put it simply it was just office momentum and the higher ups not wanting to listen to the lower level guys in the trenches they just wanted them to do their jobs after three years of work the project was canceled in April 2008. Paul said rice and I tried to point out that we were headed toward an iceberg but we were met with a lot of resistance and eventually found ourselves sliding down the deck into the icy waters of the Atlantic maybe this whole messy story is why everyone we talked to was so hush-hush about the project and why a few years later Miyamoto said if retro was gonna make a Zelda game he'd probably need to move to Texas to oversee its development for the record after we talked to Paul we reached out to everyone mentioned in this video one more time to see if they wanted to provide comment or offer an alternate perspective they all declined or ignored our correspondence and finally the big question whatever happened to the Prototype the artwork made by all other artists and the design documents Paul never kept any of it to himself he was immensely proud of a lot of the projects he worked on at retro over the years but not this one he's spent the last 15 years trying to forget about Project X not preserving it who knows maybe it's all sitting on a thumb drive in Retro's basement never to be seen again but we've got some potential good news for folks who would love to see a good sheet game someday and also the special surprise we alluded to earlier first the good news which is that Nintendo's still considering a Chic spin-off right after breath of the Wild's first trailer dropped in 2014 a vague statement from aegianoma led to rumors that link was going to be female or that players would have the option to choose Link's gender automa later clarified it was just a joke and Link was still very much a dude but then a couple years later at E3 2016 aounama said the Zelda team actually did consider having a woman playable after fans reacted positively to those rumors but they decided Zelda would make more sense as a playable character than a gender-swapped link but the idea was ultimately rejected because if Zelda's off-saving Hyrule link wouldn't really have a purpose Shigeru Miyamoto was at e32 so the next day game rant asked him to expound on that idea he said some people might wonder you know because the title is Zelda it's a female character why isn't the protagonist a female character but really to me the Legend of Zelda the main series link is the protagonist and here's the important part but within the development team too there have been talks about how it might be cool to have a game that features Chic as a protagonist it's having maybe a Zelda spin-off with Sheik as a protagonist for example I I don't think that's an impossibility a Zelda spin-off starring Chic as the protagonist sure sounds a lot like Project X but you know with better gameplay presumably and since the master sword origin story already got used in Skyward Sword it would need a new story as well Miyamoto said the Zelda team's been talking about it but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd make it themselves Nintendo's lent out the Zelda IP to quite a few outside Studios over the years Capcom made the Oracle in four Swords games grezo handled a lot of remakes including Link's Awakening and uh the Philips CDI Trilogy and brace yourself games made the recent Cadence of Hyrule spin-off most of the guys who worked on Project X already left retro a long time ago so there's no chance it could ever get made by the original team but whether it's Nintendo themselves or one of their Partners there's still a chance Sheik will get the spin-off series she deserves okay and now for the surprise while we were spending the last year chasing down old retro devs trying to get the story on Project X we came into possession of another Zelda spin-off that retro pitched a Nintendo yes another retro Zelda it was called Heroes of Hyrule much of the story focuses on three Heroes a Goron Azora and Dorito who lived 100 years in the past kinda sounds like breath of the wild doesn't it but there's one big difference instead of staying Forever Young in the shrine of Resurrection in this game links aged into an old man there's a heck of a lot more to talk about but that's where we'll leave it for now Heroes of Hyrule really deserves its own video we're already working on it and it'll be up on this channel in a few weeks subscribe if you don't want to miss it we thought we were in a good position as a studio to make a a reasonable effort on F0 because it hadn't been done for a while um you know the last F0 was probably GX 16 players um 16 AI a course editor map editor that you could share with your friends 60 frames a second on the switch would have been awesome still could have been awesome I wish we could have could have finished that with all these rumors about a new f-zero floating around we decided to take a dive into the unexplored depths of the series some prominent players in the world of f-zero have been trying to bring back the series for quite some time toshihiro nagashi the producer of f-zero GX that's my favorite one had some evolutionary ideas as soon as GX was finished and Nintendo of Europe tried to jumpstart a Revival twice kinda and then there's former Nintendo programmer Charles Godard and the Revolutionary prototype is team built for the switch what would those f-zero sequels have been like if they'd cross the finish line and why didn't they ever take off from the starting line before we get into all that let's cover a bit of the background info so that we're all on the same track Nintendo made the original f-zero on SNES and f0x on Nintendo 64 themselves along with bsf-0 Grand Prix one and two on the 64 DD expansion which were only released in Japan and also a virtual boy spin-off that was completed but locked into a fault never to be seen by the public but around the dawn of the GameCube era Nintendo started making fewer games themselves and relied more more on outside Studios Metroid Prime was outsourced to Retro Star Fox was with rare and Namco and even Zelda got lands out to Capcom we call them collaborations Miyamoto told NGC magazine what Nintendo was doing differently these days is trying to build strong relationships between the game creators at Nintendo and those at other companies it's not company versus company anymore something most of these series have in common was a decline in seals and f-zero was sadly no exception every new game sold less than the one that came before it so Nintendo contracted their old rival Sega to take the Ryans and make a new f-zero for the GameCube toshahiro nagashi the creator of the incredibly popular Daytona USA arcade series was put in charge of development even though we'd lost the hardware Market I want the Nintendo to see how great Sega was as a company nagushi were content years later the only thing we needed to admit was that Sega did not have the ability to sell Hardware hahaha Miyamoto was involved he was like a god to me then Miyamoto was the f-zero series producer from the very beginning and he told the Goshi you know how to do this all you need to do is be confident and just do it without hesitation and the results speak for themselves when it finally hits store shelves GX was lauded by critics and fans alike Gathering review scores around 90 even Nintendo was impressed at what nagashi accomplished after release they called him up and asked to see the source code because they couldn't figure out how he'd made such an amazing game with the time and budget that they'd given him Takaya and a long time series supervisor at Nintendo and creator of Captain Falcon said I'm at a loss as to how we can take the franchise further past f-zero GX but nagashi knew he could push the series even farther and wanted to make a sequel talking to UK magazine Cube he said to tell you the truth during the programming processes we did not have time to develop some of the courses I really wanted to implement in the game courses I wanted but could not incorporate into the existing f-zero game so yes there will be further advancements when it come comes to the course designing he went on to say that online play would be really interesting with a randomly generated course system some fans complained that GX was too hard and to them negoshi said and quote if you feel that you've been tortured I'm really really sorry but that the punishing difficulty was absolutely on purpose so we could probably expect to see him tough as Niels gameplay in a negoti-led sequel he also said that they pushed the cube to its graphical limits and since f-zero has never been a yearly franchise presumably the next one would have had to be for Wii but despite its critical acclam GX barely managed to sell half as many copies as the previous entry a negoshi's ideas for a sequel never became a reality later that same year a 51 episode anime was produced and Nintendo partnered with Japanese Studio suzak to produce the anime inspired game GP legend for the Game Boy Advance Nintendo was throwing the kitchen sink at f-zero you can't say they didn't try at the time but seals fell even further the entire series was dubbed into English but ended up getting canceled after the 15th episode aired on Fox suzak made one more Gameboy Advance game cheerleader f-zero climax but seals were so abysmal that Nintendo didn't bother releasing it outside of Japan that was the death nil for the franchise it was over bagushi left Sega in 2019 to form his own studio and to this day he still wants to make a sequel to GX but it seems Nintendo just isn't interested nagashi wasn't the series's only Suitor though someone else who wanted to see the world's fastest risk of return and they're gonna come up a couple of times in this video was Nintendo of Europe in early 2011 they picked up the phone and called Criterion games the guys who spent the last decade cutting their teeth on the Need for Speed and burnout series according to criterion's creative director Alex Ward Nintendo of Europe asked me if there was any chance we could do a new F0 for them and if so could you be ready to show it at E3 in June because they were short of games coming to their Wii U Hardware the UK guys were trying to match Western developers with Nintendo owned intellectual property when word got out some news outlets may have oversold the story a little saying the game almost got mid and would have been a Wii U launch title it wasn't until a few years later that Ward clarified the situation he said the guy at Nintendo Europe wasn't very high up maybe if it was Miyamoto himself a deal could have been struck but even if it was Miyamoto Criterion was 100 owned by EA so the decision would have been up to the corporate types and besides Ward's team was already up to their necks making a new Need for Speed so it was a bit of an exaggeration to say the Wii U almost launched with the Criterion me at f-zero after nine years without a new entry Captain Falcon was becoming better known as that guy who punches in Super Smash Brothers and people started asking Miyamoto why in 2012 French side game called polder readers asking what series they missed the most one of the top results was f-zero so they showed Miyamoto and said nobody really understands why Nintendo hasn't made a new one since 2004. is there a chance we can see it come back on Wii U miyamoto's eyes opened wide and he said I'm really pleased to hear their opinion because since the first episode on SNES many games have been made but the series has evolved very little I thought people had grown weary of it I'd like to say thank you very much and try to weigh it by playing Nintendo land's f-zero minigame I'm also very curious and I'd like to ask those people why F0 what do you want that we haven't done before a few months later at E3 gamespeed asked a similar question Mario Kart 8 made a showing but where was f-zero I certainly understand that people want a new F0 game Yamoto told them I think where I struggle is that I don't really have a good idea for what's new that we could bring to f-zero that would really turn it into a great game again certainly I can see how people looking at Mario Kart 8 could see through the anti-gravity a connection to f-zero but I don't know at this point what direction we could go in with a new F0 Captain Falcon's Creator Emma Mora said something similar that f-zero needed a grand new idea if it was going to make a comeback some fans bristled at their comment new tracks HD graphics online play wasn't that enough to be fair to Nintendo though the series had been evolving better graphics faster speeds more cars but it wasn't enough to keep seals from driving off cliff people just weren't buying them so from that perspective maybe it was Gamers who weren't satisfied with mirror Evolution maybe it really was gonna take a revolution more on that later but to better understand f-zero's past as well as his future we need to Veer off track real quick and look at how the genres puttered along in its absence during the 20-year Drive several Studios pulled for position to become f0's spiritual successor with games like red art and formula Fusion if you're an f-zero fan at some point you might have Googled something along the lines of what games can I play like f-zero if you did the top result was probably fast rmx Not only was it a switch exclusive it was a switch launch title and was apparently received quite favorably as the next best thing to an actual f-zero we asked fast rmx's designer and programmer Manfred lindsner was that your intention if Nintendo won't make take it we will not exactly he said the first game on we wear started as a prototype of fish swimming around a Kirby stream he made a joke to his team that and I quote we could make a game out of it and call it fish zero the joke quickly got serious though and over the next few minutes they decided to abandon the fish altogether and make a futuristic racer instead they eventually made more ambitious sequels for Wii U and switch with some help from our old friends at Nintendo of Europe linsner said yeah he'd heard the Criterion story it seems some Nintendo of Europe employees are fans of f-zero he told us adding a little smiley face after we shared some not too exciting prototypes with Nintendo of Europe they give us very honest feedback that was super valuable because we were a bit lost in technical details and they saw better than us the full potential we could reach they helped us understand how to design tracks and environments that played and felt like we envisioned we were very happy how the sequels turned on and of course we're also very grateful that Nintendo published the Wii U physical edition van and load and encouraged us to make a launch game for the Nintendo switch listener made fast rmx with a team of four guys it's got 30 tracks 15 cars up to eight players online and it runs at 60 frames a second in 1080P keep those numbers in mind for later lindsner said he couldn't share exact seals figures with us but it was the best selling game they ever made and now five years later it's still selling well each and every week another sequel he told us is definitely on the cards right around the time fast rmx was racking up high scores another Studio entered the wrist but they were determined to make a real f-zero sequel Falcon and all that studio was two high Labs who needs a little bit of an introduction located just on the road from Nintendo HQ in Kyoto Japan chuhai was funded by Giles Goddard a programmer with a long history at the big n macaron 1990 he was the first non-japanese programmer to ever work at Nintendo simply put because they couldn't find any Japanese programmers as talented as Giles he worked on the original Star Fox Mario 64 Dutch and the Giant and many others including a 3D game boy game called X that only released in Japan Charles and another British programmer Dylan kuthbert worked in an office separate from the Japanese staff and Miyamoto used it as a smoking room to brainstorm in in 2002 Charles left Nintendo to start his own Studio chuhai Labs where they continued to collaborate with Nintendo like steeldriver 1 and 2 where gels was programming director Miyamoto was producer and the director was a mamura who said he made subwars's mission mode to be like f-zero in slow motion more recently juhai released the VR spiritual successor to 1080 called carved snowboarding and their newest game was cursed to golf which has seen its share of prison that's a pretty long introduction but you get the point Charles is extremely talented has a long history with Nintendo and runs his own studio in 2021 Charles did a Reddit AMA that had a thousand and 300 comments but we just want to highlight two of them he said f-zero was his favorite game on Super Nintendo but more importantly revealed that his Studio made an f-zero prototype with ultra realistic physics a month later he sat down for an hour-long interview with gimmick's plan during which he spent about one minute talking about that f-zero prototype gel said he'd pitch it to Nintendo but and we're quoting here Nintendo are very wary about using old IP because it's such a huge thing for them to do it's much easier to go with a new IP than to reuse an old one we were kind of stuck in a catch-22 working with Nintendo because we'd say to them we want to do this f-zero game can you give us all this money and they say but you don't have enough people and I'd say well if we had the money we could get the people so it was forever this kind of ridiculous Catch-22 of them wanting us to make a game us pitching a game and then them saying you don't have enough people we were dying to hear more about it so we got in touch with them and it turns out Charles's f-zero really was revolutionary before we get into what Giles told us we want to let you know that you can now support did you know gaming by buying eShop codes give passcodes and even full games on our own store instead of giving your money to a giant faceless corporation like Walmart or Target you can buy the goods on screen through us and help support these videos in the process this isn't a sponsorship it's our own store with everything on it curated by us and our partners fam hype who are fully certified to sell Nintendo products and more so you you know you won't be getting any dodgy codes from us if you want a convenient way to buy store codes and games and help support the show go to store.didyounogaming.com now back to Giles he told us it was super fast super chaotic super realistic physics so it feels like f-zero but there's a lot more depth there it was quite interesting to see what situations you could get the entire race into you could bump into one car it would bump into two other cars and they would bump into the rest of the pack and it would cause an entire pileup so it was just fun playing around and seeing how badly you could screw up there is a fresh take on f-zero would have been really cool each car had four Jets and if a car took damage one jet might fail and the Cards start leaning in that direction if two Jets field the car would flip over the demo was made with a team of three shells did the programming another guy did Art and another made some tweaks to chuhai's custom engine although they'd obviously need a bigger team to make a full game Charles went on to explain the more evolutionary aspects he said the idea was massive multiplayer massive as in 16 human players 16 AI so 32 in total a course editor map editor or you could share with your friends online and yeah 60 frames a second on the switch so of course we had to ask can we get some footage of that demo um I'm Consulting my legal experts in my head I think I can because we Nintendo didn't pay for the the demo we made it on our own it was our own code our assets and I have it upstairs it's it's on my PC it's just not running on the latest uh you know gfx chips um so yeah we could do that I could do that holy [ __ ] needless to say we were pretty stoked he also said he'd upload it to the Internet so fans could download it and play it for free although he wanted a little something for his trouble no you don't have to pay for it I'll do it for free I know if I if I get if I get 5 000 more uh Twitter followers I'll make it now we were double stoked and over the next couple of months we boxed emails back and forth with chuhai talking details tragically though the whole thing ended up falling apart over legal concerns we'll spare you the details but basically we all agreed the future of Charles's studio and the games they'll make are far more important and not worth risking just for this YouTube video but at least we got to hear the story most developers keep these kind of things a secret so no hard feelings we love you Giles and everyone should go follow them on Twitter anyway the dude's a legend Charles had said the game never got made because of money so how much is it gonna cost he said nowadays less than a million dollars because it doesn't have to be very big it just has to play really well you don't need that many programmers you could probably do it with five people less than a million for sure we got the Feeling Giles asked Nintendo for more than a million bucks back in those negotiations to us a million sounds like a pretty small budget but fast rmx was made cheaper than that and with a smaller team a few tasks would inevitably have to be outsourced like how fast are a mags contracted an outside control closer and voice actor but Giles has been in the biz since the 80s and has plenty of experience budgeting games to chew High the guy knows what he's talking about that's a lot of potential Financial upside with minimal investment child still has a lot of enthusiasm for the project but even if it wasn't an official f-zero title a lot of fans would still love to see that prototype developed into a full switch game we know you're gonna watch this Giles so you know respectfully please get back to the negotiating table with Nintendo or just make a spiritual successor on your own terms show us your moves show me a moves also follow him here on Twitter folks

Channel: DYKG Clips

Views: 253,919

Keywords: lost games, lost video games, lost media, cancelled games, canceled games, animal crossing, animal crossing 2, g-zero, zero racers, pokemon stars, retro studios zelda, cancelled zelda game, zelda wii, f-zero wii u, wii u, f-zero, nintendo switch, switch

Id: cTM5m7MqyO8

Length: 57min 6sec (3426 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023