by Paul on Jul 16th, 2018

Speaking to RareFanDaBase, Rare veteran Paul Machacek has spoken about a long lost Battletoads game that never saw release. 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.”

Be sure to have a read of the interview in full, it’s very good.

Categories: Interviews