Gamecube Prototype Games

[Benita Vandervoort]

SpaceWorld, which ran until 2001, was essentially a precursor to the digital-only Direct showcases, where Nintendo would reveal its new games and hardware. The 2000 show was infamous for revealing both the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance.

Some of these are just different air vents or coloured labels, but the top of the prototype is transparent to allow users to see the disc inside, something that wasn't carried over into the final design.

More interesting is the iconic controller, which sports a third bean-shaped button (like the final X and Y buttons) as well as no d-pad - it's been replaced by a Start button on the left prong instead.

Nintendo also showed off some infamous game concepts and demos to prove the power of its new console, which I remember watching on repeat in awe at the time. That included a brief look at Samus before Metroid Prime; a glimpse of what a new Banjo Kazooie game may have looked like before Rare was bought by Microsoft; and Mario 128, a tech demo for what would later become Pikmin.

Back on Christmas 2021 I tempted fate and hosted an hours-long livestream of this unreleased game on my Twitch channel. I'd had a copy of it for a couple of years up to that point but was unsure what to do with it over legal concerns I had regarding releasing it. Naturally this attracted a lot of attention in my direction and when nobody sent their legal team after me for doing a no-no I figured I was in the clear. I reached out to the founders of the BattleBots company (again) and said I'd procured a copy of the game prototype. I asked if I could just go ahead and post it online for people to play. I was informed that as long as no money was exchanging hands in the process they were finally okay with this prototype being out there. Prior to releasing this prototype the game had only been spotted in a select few places: a demo was playable at the taping of Comedy Central's final season of the show in 2003, and competitor Donald Hutson brought with him his copy of the prototype and a Gamecube dev kit to the taping of the 2015 season of the show and let people play it there.

Thank you for posting. I'm not much into GameCube these days but even hearing about this being preserved and available for people to check out it's so great to hear. It's also so awesome with the number of prototypes turning up across the board these days.

The GameCube prototype 10.8 of Sonic Heroes is an early build, which is different than the earlier E3 demo in that the entire game is present on the disc. This was thought to be the earliest known full build of Sonic Heroes until 2024, when an earlier one was discovered.

The title screen is more or less identical to the E3 prototype (only without the logo for obvious reasons); this is the last known build to use the early design for both the logos and title screen, as the final version is also used in the earlier 9.28 build (although unfinished) and then changed again in the undumped GameCube 10.13 prototype, and updated once more in the 11.18 prototype.

While a majority of the cutscenes and sound mixing have been finalized at this point of development, some were likely changed late in development, as not only were they nowhere near as close to being completed, but some sounds also contain differences.

A prototype for an unreleased game for the GameCube console has been found by an avid Nintendo collector. Some lucky finds of rare games for the sixth-generation console have been making headlines recently, including one considered as a "holy grail" by GameCube fans. However, this one seems to be topping them all, being that it had never seen the light of day.

Unreleased video games are among the rarest finds that collectors can get these days and can sometimes cost thousands of dollars. Combine that with the certitude of GameCube having one of the best game libraries, such a big discovery is surely going to garner much attention. While it's true that the GameCube never managed to outpace both PlayStation 2 and Xbox in terms of sales during its time, some of its games were seen as the pinnacle in the history of video games.

In an attempt to preserve the GameCube's library, a Nintendo collector and YouTuber, cake_hoarder, has discovered that a development GameCube they recently bought contained the disc of an unreleased game. While testing out the prototype, they found out that it was for Pickles, a platformer/adventure game starring a unicycle-riding monkey. A quick Google search suggested that Pickles was developed by the now-defunct Santa Cruz Games in 2005 and 2006.

Via a short Twitter video, cake_hoarder notes that the game disc in their possession has 12 levels that are split between two different worlds. Unfortunately, the footage only manages to show the first level of Pickles. Further tinkering is desperately needed as the prototype is proving to be a bit unstable, managing to boot up only once in about every 10 tries. The collector also plans to dump the ROM of the game online for preservation purposes.

While there's no confirmation from either Nintendo or some ex members of Santa Cruz Games, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation commented on the Twitter post that the footage is of the same demo shown to him during the 2006's Game Connection event. Back then, the prototype only served as a tech demo when Santa Cruz Games was looking for a potential publisher. Interestingly, this wasn't the first time an unreleased tech demo for a Nintendo console made waves on the internet.

Preserving video games is no easy feat, especially when dealing with unreleased ones, as there are sure to be some hurdles in the way, even when just trying to boot up the games. Given the big challenge, cake_hoarder is planning to document and reveal all they can get from Pickles through YouTube.

cake bought a dev GameCube but inside he discovered a disc for a unreleased GameCube game. Testing out the prototype, he discovered it was for Pickles, a platformer/adventure game all about monkeys riding unicycles. Well, at least, that's what we know.

According to cake, he believes the disc has 12 levels on it, split between two different worlds, but the prototype is proving to be a bit unstable, meaning he's only got the first world to work currently. The level in question appears to be a big wharf, with wooden pathways suspended above water.

Most other data we can find on this game has been compiled by unseen64, which reveals that Santa Cruz was working on the title in 2005/06. The demo that cake is playing may well be the demo referred to on the site. It was apparently shown at Game Connection 2006 but otherwise has barely been seen since.

Alana has been with Nintendo Life since 2022, and while RPGs are her first love, Nintendo is a close second. She enjoys nothing more than overthinking battle strategies, characters, and stories. She also wishes she was a Sega air pirate.

How cool.

Games that never see the light of day.... there must be hundreds and thousands of cancelled games that nobody ever gets to ever see at all. What an interesting glimpse behind the scenes.

It might be very easy to dump the ROM (or ISO in this case), any soft-modded Wii can dump standard Wii or GameCube discs using CleanRip.

Although it might not be that straight forward considering this is a development disc rather than a retail disc, but what a cool find!

The demo gameplay looks pretty simplistic, but the graphics look super nice. Really bold and bright for the era. Reminds me of Super Mario Sunshine, but not many developers were pulling off that kind of thing back then. Lots of nicely rounded, cartoony curves.

Lost Kingdoms Ver 0.60 is a prototype version of Lost Kingdoms that was dumped and released on the Internet Archive in April 2019. It was first revealed with other Gamecube prototype disks in a Tweet on the Forest of Illusion Twitter, an account dedicated to video game preservation. While the original Internet Archive entry and Twitter Tweet have been removed, the ISO for the prototype version can still be found online.

A Reddit comment by SuperGameJoy details how they found and bought 9-10 Gamecube NR disks at a sale, to which they then worked with Forest of Illusion to dump online. According to the description on the Internet Archive, the disk may have been "used for review purposes," to which the debug functions would most likely assist greatly in. As written on the disk, this version of Lost Kingdoms was compiled on March 4th, 2002 - a month and a half before the game's North American release.

While the disk is labelled as Lost Kingdoms, the logo at the start screen displays RUNE as taken from the Japanese version of the game. However, if a save file error box is prompted, the game is referred to as Lost Kingdoms. The discrepancy goes further with the game's file properties - while listed as Lost Kingdoms in the ISO's internal name, the RUNE logo is used. The Japanese name appears again in the .h4m movie files with the files rune_op and rune_ed.

The most significant gameplay differences in Ver 0.60 are the debug elements left in from testing. While in a stage, a persistent progress bar with various memory and scene counters appear at the bottom of the screen. A yellow spherical hitbox appears whenever a monster attacks, depending in size depending on the range. Beta footage of Lost Kingdoms shown in the Japanese gaming show GameWave indicate that these are both development elements that were kept in the prototype.

Enemy encounters also do not appear, unless scripted to occur after a cutscene. In enemy-heavy stages, a large message may appear in the middle of the screen stating "Memory Over!" The player can also induce this message by spawning a battle while another battle is taking place, crashing the game shortly afterwards. This does not go away until the player exits the stage.

Another significant difference between Ver 0.60 and the retail version of Lost Kingdoms is the partially completed script. Many proper nouns are transliterated from Japanese, with some lines and most card descriptions left entirely untranslated. Several portions of the script also differ from the finished version both in formatting and wording. An example is as follows:

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