large.jpg

There was a bit of a surprise on the latest Retro Spielen webcast with legendary composer Chris Huelsbeck - the show's special guest was none other than founding president and creative director of the defunct and very much missed Factor 5, Julian Eggebrecht. The stage was set for some nostalgic chatter regarding one of Europe's most talented studios - and a former Nintendo partner.

But what we were not expecting was a delicious insight into Super Turrican, the first of the series to be released on the Super Nintendo. At the one hour and twenty minutes mark Eggebrecht says that the version of Super Turrican we know and love was not the one that they wanted to release. Due to the publisher being unwilling or unable to pay up for the 6Mbit cartridge production costs, the game ended up being shipped on a smaller 4Mbit cartridge instead.

This was a well known fact for many years now, but Eggebrecht addressed what was left on that extra 33 percent of ROM memory. The whole final level was cut, including an extra boss. One of the level's unique gameplay gimmicks was that you had to use Turrican's freeze beam to "unfreeze" enemies in order to progress, a unique gameplay twist for this section of the game. If you ever had a feeling the game abruptly ends and feels like there was something else left to do, now you know why.

That was not the end of Eggebrecht's revelations. This definitive 6Mbit Super Turrican ROM was set to be released back in 2008 when both Super Turrican and Mega Turrican arrived on Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console service, as a special bonus download for people who purchased both titles. However, this never came to be due to Nintendo's refusal to publish anything that wasn't commercially available previously - something which was company policy back then.

As long time fans of the series we are sad to know that Nintendo refused to turn this wrong into a right using the Virtual Console service. We can only hope that one day that proper version will surface to the hardcore Turrican-loving audience - do you consider yourself to be part of that audience? Let us know with a comment.

[source twitch.tv]