I’m frankly shocked that my man @treefroggy hasn’t mentioned EarthBound 64 yet, so I guess I’ll sneak in here and say… I’m glad this ended up becoming a gorgeous GBA game (some would say the best video game of all time (and they would be correct)) instead of whatever the heck this might have been!
Okay, one more.
This right here is my jam, because I happen to be a specialist on the subject, but only for the Game Boy Color.
I’ll keep my other revelations close to the vest, but let’s start with the biggest what could have been: Tyrannosaurus Tex.
Not only was the game unreleased, but it went unfinished, with its main developer stealing the source code late in development and preventing any hope of a release.
Piko Interactive somehow managed to get the rights and a prototype that they finished.
I also like the idea that Mother 3 could have been a late Super Famicom game, if only they had stuck with that platform rather than switching to the N64. So if the team had ignored the siren call of 3D development on the N64 and stuck with an initial vision, releasing in 1996 or 1997, in what ways would that have differed from the GBA version we got?
I suspect it’s because this doesn’t really look like it’d push the platform forward! It looks pretty blocky, I forgot how early it seemed in these videos.
Could have been the only rhythm game for n64 during an era which had all the rhythm games
graphically the developers were inexperienced with 3D, that’s what stalled the project, thereby stalling the DD because it had no games, thereby killing the DD and mother 3 in the process.
If DD had worked out, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be watering trees in Zelda OoT
@Taliesin_Merlin it would have not had all the brownie brown-isms of the final product. But still would have resembled something like a chulip more than a mother 2. Would have been really something.
A y2k controller in 2006!! We didn’t deserve it. 
came here to post this!
Honestly i think Mother as a n64 game would suck lol
Ah! Here is the footage I was searching for. It isn’t entirely fair to say we didn’t get something out of these early builds of Resident Evil 4. We got quite a few, and that is lovely!
I actually looked up the Vib Ripple email. Here’s what I sent:
I realize that this is a strange question to ask, but I couldn’t find the answer anywhere on the Internet. How do you unlock the final twelve levels in Vib Ripple? I’ve completed the other 48 (although not with a gold in all of them), but for whatever reason, the final 12 will not unlock. I’ve tried looking for the answer elsewhere, but couldn’t find any information on the game on the Internet.
And here was their response:
Apparently you must clear all the previous stages with a gold ranking to unlock the final stages.
Just as a warning though, we made this game a long time ago and aren’t absolutely sure that this is how you unlock them.
Good luck!
and did it work??
I’m pretty sure it did. (This was almost a decade ago; I don’t exactly have the save file on me anymore.)
The craziest part of the Saturn Shenmue demo is that it has most of the scenes from Shenmue 2 so apparently they were still intending to make it one massive game, probably before realizing they’d never be able to complete it within ANY console’s life cycle.
To be honest, the Earthbound 64 stuff always looked (and still does) super appealing to me, though I’m probably as big a Mother not-fan as you’ll ever meet, so that might have something to do with it. (I also have some kind of anti-nostalgia for the GBA somehow.)