Quick The Thunder Rabbit CD32 Cover

After the success of Sonic The Hedgehog back in the day there was a flood of animal mascot platformers on every system imaginable, trying with varied degrees of success to cash in on the overnight popularity of the genre. French developer Titus Software was one of many companies all over the world giving the genre a spin, with moderate success in the form of the developer's very own mascot "Titus The Fox" and "Oscar" among their finest efforts.

Added in 1994 to the euro-platformer long list of candidates was "Quik The Thunder Rabbit", developed by Stywox and published by Titus for the Commodore Amiga and CD32. An MS-DOS conversion followed and that was that, another solid if unremarkable platform game added to the rather huge pile of them in the '90s.

That is until Assembler Game's user The Real Phoenix posted a prototype build of "Quik" for the Super Nintendo. It is a rather curious prototype that, despite having no sound at all (you already clicked the video below and was wondering if your speakers were busted, didn't you?), it clearly shows an impressive amount of parallax scrolling in the background that wasn't available on the previous versions of the game, something the Super Nintendo was well known for.

Adding to the mystery here is a functional horizontal shmup section that sees you avoiding attacks from a giant enemy in the background, and even some sort of one-on-one fighting stage! You can check out our run of the prototype (that works on real hardware) in the footage below.

Sadly the prototype crashes once you reach the one-on-one level, leaving us wondering if there are more levels beyond. There was also no information given on how the game ended up with The Real Phoenix, leaving us to speculate that it must have in the works around 1994 or 1995, as a pitch to Titus to publish the game on the Super Nintendo. With tight controls, multiple game genres and some impressive sprite work, "Quick The Thunder Rabbit" might have turned out as a surprise hit that would have surely joined late European Super Nintendo releases from the publisher, like "Realm".

As more of these prototypes surface we can't but wonder how many more games are still out there, waiting to be preserved for future video game historians.