Hearing the name 'Rare' likely makes you instinctively jump towards nostalgic thoughts of games like Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, and Donkey Kong 64; the studio's partnership with Nintendo throughout the '90s generated some truly classic titles that are still adored today. Another iconic franchise from this era is Battletoads - a game perhaps best well known for its immense difficulty - but did you ever play the one called Super Battletoads? Sadly, no one did.
Speaking to RareFanDaBase, video game engineer, producer, and Rare veteran Paul Machacek has spoken about a long lost Battletoads game that sadly never saw the light of day. Super Battletoads was designed for the Game Boy, and was 100% complete, but the project was ultimately cancelled.
"Probably the most annoying is Super Battletoads on the Gameboy. Heard of it? No, nor has almost anyone else. It was the fourth one I’d written in the serious, was a spinoff from the arcade game of the same name, and was 100% finished and signed off by Test. Then it got cancelled shortly after I moved onto Donkey Kong Land because the arcade game had underperformed in market and Tradewest pulled the plug on the whole franchise."
Amazingly, the game was re-found after 20 years despite Machacek being the only one who remembered its existence.
"In 2015, during Rare Replay development, with long term members of Rare saying to me “don’t be silly, that game never existed”, we found it sitting on an old disc. A finished copy of the game. One of the engineers here happened to have a Gameboy emulator and we dragged the file into it and waited with bated breath. It ran!...
I worked out an infinite lives cheat, applied it to the binary file by “poking” it and got one of our team to play through the whole thing in one go and record the video. It took a little over an hour (with infinite lives) but was all there. A 100% completed game. Apparently, no bugs were seen. "
So there you have it, we almost had another Battletoads game on Game Boy that we'll likely never get to see. As an interesting side note, Machacek also went into detail about the development process behind Battletoads games, explaining how they made them be so frustratingly difficult. If you want to read the interview in full, make sure to check it out here.
"As I’d develop I’d boot the game directly into the level I was working on and obviously played it to death. Each time I completed a level (to ensure it worked) I’d then tweak something to make it harder, then I’d get a member of our test team to sit next to me and if they completed the level I’d make it a bit harder. So, we deliberately create individual levels that were designed to be “rock hard” on their own, let alone strung together into a sequence of nine that made up a game. Good luck everyone."
Are you a Battletoads fan? Feel free to share your Battletoads stories and memories with us in the comments below.
[source rarefandabase.com]
Comments 39
Let's be honest here: the Battletoads games were bad.
I always convinced myself that I liked the games because I liked the graphics/characters as a 7 year old, but in reality I didn't really enjoy the games that much. The gameplay was bad. I also remembered wanting Battletoads Double Dragon because I liked both, only to find out that it did not feel as good as Double Dragon at all.
Hopefully someone can accidentally drop that rom onto the internet someday...
I've never played--nor do I know anything about--Battletoads, but it's a shame when a finished product is never released. Like Star Fox 2's place in limbo up until very recently. Honestly, there's just no sense in it. Even if the game sold relatively poor, would it really have put them at a loss? If the developers have already put the work in and have been paid for their services, would making and distributing copies to retailers be that much more expensive? At least then there would be the chance of returning a profit, but not releasing a finished game means that the development budget was all for nothing. At least we now live in an era where games can be downloaded digitally without the need to ship out copies, so there's no excuse for this sort of thing to happen anymore.
That design philosophy was bad. Make the game harder for the dev that already knows the game inside-out? Yeah, the public is not going to like it.
It's a similar issue to adventure games. The solutions may be obvious or clever to the dev, but to the gamer they are obtuse.
I've been on a project which had racing segments. They tweaked the difficulty by having their resident racing guy go a few times at each race, record his time and make the highest rank a little below him. So the player would need to be almost as good as him to get full reward, but no need to be an expert to finish the race.
@Not_Soos Considering it was a fully analog age, yes, it would have probably been a waste of time and resources to manufacture copies that wouldn't sell.
In digital age it's easy to simply put the game out there on Steam or even sell it directly, the cost is negligible. Back then it wasn't worth it.
@BigKing Yeah they had gameplay problems but they were varied and full of game design ideas through the game. Rare just had to pair with Nintendo to fix their gameplay problems.
Be nice if they could release it digitally somewhere.
It's a shame then. They could release it digitally now, though, couldn't they?
Someone snatch that and upload it online for us to enjoy!
@BigKing you are dead wrong.
i remember playing battletoads on the SNES with a friend when I was younger, it was rock hard!
Games were a lot lot lot smaller back then. From start to finish. If they didn’t make them difficult and often cheap in the ways to die players would do them in an hour.
It was the arcade mentality of “one more go”
That was to eat your 10 pence pieces...
At home it was to make you feel better for the money you spent on it.
Actually, there is another game called Super Battletoads!
It's really just the Japanese version of the Arcade game.
Okay, we need a leak here.
Kinda looking forward to this new Battletoads game on Xbox One. Microsoft didn’t show any trailers or screenshots for it, but I hope it turns out well.
Kinda surprised this wasnt covered earlier since we got to see footage of it since the Rare Replay interviews
Serious
Hopefully for preservation sake that gets a release into the wild, limited storage can lead to a higher chance of a true loss.
Is ThIs DaRk SoUlSsSsSs?
@SmaggTheSmug I feel like at the very least they could've done a limited release or something, just to get the game out there. Maybe only distribute it to one certain retailer. That way at least the whole development cycle wasn't a waste.
Why wasn't it in Rare Replay?
Now there's an idea, make it an unlockable in the new Battletoads game coming out! Even if old fans have an issue with the new game, they would still all pick it up if they could play a Battletoads game from back in the day that never saw release.
I mean come on, we had their N64 games running on XBONE. Can't be too difficult, right?
Would've thought Super Battletoads to be a dev name for Battlemaniacs. (Because you know, everything was Super on the SNES.)
They should re-release this like they re-released Starfox 2 (which was also cancelled but completed).
Good that they found that game but hopefully someone do the right thing and put that rom on the internet so we could play it for free. Same for the Killer Instinct 2 port for Super NES which was also 100% completed but never released, hopefully someone found that one too, heard that it was better than the N64 port (KI Gold).
So sad.
I now have a name for my pain...
@BigKing The reason Battletoads/Double Dragon didnt feel like a DD game is because it was a Battletoads game not a Double Dragon game. And really the only good one was the Arcade game.
@BouncingHat. It might not happened even though Rare is owned by MS they have put out games on Nintendo's portable systems. They had a few on GBA because MS doesn't have a portable system it's not direct competition.
@Not_Soos Back in those days the Big N controlled all cartridge manufacturing and wouldn’t accept anything less than (IIRC) an order for 100,000 cartridges at minimum. So most of the financial risk back then was in actually releasing your game rather than making it! 😅 The development probably didn’t cost much, dev teams were tiny in those days, especially for GameBoy games, so it probably cost them £150k max to develop.
Hopefully Nintendo will do a GameBoy Mini and this will be on it! 😅
I bought the original Battletoads for Gameboy. It was a polished game and had a good soundtrack, but yes it was hard as hell. I never beat it, and it became extremely frustrating in the later levels.
So no, it's not a good idea to make games overly difficult.
These rock hard games would all be quite appealing if they had something like a save/password system or a level select screen.
Limited continues and starting from scratch everytime is a bit too much for me nowadays.
@Savino As you can tell, I was a big fan of the nes Battletoads. It was packed with so many different game play ideas and for me the difficulty gave it tons of replay value. I never managed to beat it as a kid. I replayed it a few years ago and imo it totally holds up. I agree, among the best games of that era!
Battletoads (particularly the original NES one) was a great game, as others mentioned they had some good / varied gameplay ideas. The controls were tight for the most part, the game is very hard, at times overly difficult (lv 3 race track, snake pit, etc) but that's part of it's charm, similar to those who like Dark Souls.
Classic games were great cause they did not hold your hand, but forced you to git gud. Many games these days are too easy or take way too long to ramp up the difficulty. The ideal is likely in between somewhere, but I enjoy the challenge and games tailored to the long time gamers, and hope it one day releases on Switch as VC or whatever Ninty wants to call it
The Battletoad games were amazing, made for players that liked a challenge. No easy mode and getting extra lives was hard. A lot of game makers could learn from that design philosophy. Instead today there is too much "experience the story if you suck at games mode".
I can't even remember the endings but beating the games was a rush you just don't get too often anymore.
Sounds serious
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs and Battletoads Double Dragon on the SNES were brilliant, never played the Gameboy versions sadly.
@BigKing Try Battletoads the Arcade game .. its actually really fun and most importantly not that hard
Battletoad could be hard but it had a sharp breakover point at the hardest part. Once you mastered the techniques it was a blast to play and funny as crap. I reiterate we need a Battletoads port for Switch
You know what to do: Dump the rom on the internet!
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