Beta Roms

Duggy747

Ah yes, beta roms. Games that we now love were completely different in this stage while others never made it passed it (some deseverdly ) Anywho, just thought I'd throw up some information about them as I always find it interesting to babble on about.

One interesting game was Mario Kart 64. It was known as Mario Kart R in it's beta stage and featured MagiKoopa instead of Donkey Kong as a character! Seems a bit odd to replace MagiKoopa especially as he was fully animated but I suppose in order to keep as true as possible to the Snes version they put DK back in. (Then where the hell is Koopa Troopa!?! Though I prefer Wario as he's my favourite!) Here's some pics you can see of the game in Beta stage featuring MagiKoopa and a different title screen!











Here's a video of the Beta game in action (Sorry about the quality!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgrbtZlmG8k

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Perhaps the most notorious prototype ever is the cancelled SNES game StarFox 2 (Yeah, this was actually made). The game got shelved because Nintendo wanted to break away from 3D games on the Snes in order for more attention to be focused on the N64, despite the console being a year and a half away from being properly released (Nintendo didn't predict on delaying the console at the time!) This is a pity really, considering the Japanese version game is actually fully completed bar a few debugging tools still visible. Strangely though some nice bloke nicked the source code and slapped it up on the net, nobody has any idea how somebody could grab a game this rare.

Here's some pics of what could've been had this come out for the SNES:







Yea, that's right you could actually turn into a transformer thingy and walk around the place.


Agús some footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBG2EbH4soo

This game would've sold like hot cakes had it come out for the Snes like it was supposed to. Evidently many elements of this game were taken and slapped into the N64 version.

There are 3 different version of this game out there, 2 are Alpha stages with bits & pieces programmed in. The 3rd is the complete Japanese version. Fortunately, some nice chaps on the interweb have released 2 patches; 1 for English translation, the other removing the debugging tools and fixes a few bugs. These pretty much finished the game off so now you can play the game is if it was any other released ROM on the Snes. I highly recommend this game as it pretty much pushed the Snes to it's limits.

corkproducers

Thanks for posting this up!
Is there any other rare beta roms you know of?

o1s1n

Well I wouldn't really call them rare but there are quite a few Sonic beta versions out there. Including that oddity which is Sonic Crackers.

None of them can top Starfox 2 though. I stumbled across that myself a few years ago and couldnt believe it was shelved so close to completion.

o1s1n

If you're interested in unreleased games, there's a good little site documenting some here - http://www.lostlevels.org/