Zelda
Image: ArtStation / Sammy Hall

Earlier this week, our friends over at Shinesparkers discovered concept art of two reportedly cancelled Retro Studios projects.

One was an axed Legend of Zelda game starring Sheik, and the other was a Super Mario title about the mischievous ghost, Boo. The artwork itself was done by former Retro Studios pre-production artist, Sammy Hall, and was featured on his ArtStation page.

Hall has now explained to IGN how both projects were in pre-production at the time, and that he doubts many people at Nintendo saw them before they were both canned:

I doubt many at Nintendo proper saw much of any of this stuff. I was mostly put into a room like Milton from Office Space and tasked to brainstorm between other projects.

He goes onto explain how the ideas for these games came from the ex-Retro leads Mark Pacini, Todd Keller, and Kynan Pearson, and "the week they went to create their other studios" the projects were cancelled.

It's believed Retro either decided or was asked to explore new ideas with Nintendo's existing IP, following the success of the Metroid Prime series. If you would like to see the concept art for both of these projects, take a look at our previous post.

[source ign.com]