Rare created a Game Boy Battletoads game that has never been released

It is quite common for a developing game to be canceled even before it has emerged. This happens often early, at the prototype stage, but sometimes a game is being developed before the plug is removed. In even rarer cases (such as
Star Fox 2 before the release of the SNES Clbadic) a game is completely finished and always put away anyway.

That's exactly what happened to Rare over 20 years ago, according to Paul Machacek, a rare employee. In an interview with RareFanDaBase, Machacek claimed to have worked on a Game Boy version of Super Battletoads (another name for the game Battletoads Aracde ) that was developed until the end, but canceled when the arcade title underperformed.

RareFanDaBase: Have there been any box projects that you particularly like and want to see happen?

Paul Machacek : Probably the most boring is Super Battletoads on Gameboy. Heard spoken? No, and hardly anyone else. This was the fourth I had written in earnest, was a fallout from the arcade game of the same name, and was 100% finished and signed by the test. Then it was canceled shortly after my move to Donkey Kong Land because the arcade game had underperformed the market and Tradewest closed the franchise.

In 2015, during Rare Replay "Do not be silly, this game never existed", we found it sitting on an old record. A finished copy of the game. One of the engineers had a Gameboy emulator and we dragged the file in and waited impatiently. He ran! I could not believe it, no one had seen this game for about 22 years, and I was the only person who remembered its existence at all.

Then, we needed to see exactly what was there and to be a Battletoad game that no one had played for over 20 years, that would not be easy. However, I still had the source code (which I no longer had the ability to compile but which could still be viewed). I worked on a cheat of infinite lives, I applied it to the binary file by "tapping" it and asked a member of our team to play it all at one time and then Save the video. It took a little over an hour (with infinite lives) but everything was there. A complete game at 100%. Apparently, no bug has been seen.

It is unlikely that Microsoft (which acquired Rare in 2002) bothered to release a Game Boy title 20 years later, but with the original source code, anything is possible. The return of Nintendo to Star Fox 2 after decades is proof.

Source: RareFanDaBase