It’s crazy the number of cool features that get cut out of most games during development. It usually boils down to time or money; either there is not enough time to finish everything, or something is too expensive to keep pushing. No game is immune to these cuts, but the stuff that was left out becomes downright fascinating when we focus on the games that have become classics. I’m sure that some levels were dumped from the final version of Kao the Kangaroo 2, but it’s not as interesting as if I tell you that Chrono Trigger was going to have extra dungeons, is it?
Luckily, there is extra content that was left out of Chrono Trigger (keep reading to find out what!), and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Literally, every classic game we have looked up had something cut from their final versions. It’s an endless array of alternate universes where your favorite titles could have ended up very different from the games you know. Some of them just have unused sprites or textures, but others are downright mind-blowing. Turns out that some of these classics could have been even better. Others would just have been plain weird but are still funny to imagine.
Sifting through the mountain of awesome features left on the cutting room floor, we have picked the 25 most interesting to show you what could have been. Deleted content is a time-honored tradition; every era is represented here. These will make you wish that development times and budgets were always as large as the artists’ ambitions.
25 Which Bond Will You Be?
In the Nintendo 64 masterpiece GoldenEye 007, Rare included one of the best multiplayer modes in the history of the console. That mode was going to be even better at first, because the company went through painstaking lengths to digitize and include the face of all the actors to portray James Bond until that point. These different depictions of Bond would have been available as multiplayer characters, but they were cut out at the last second. Why? Because Rare failed to clear it with the actual actors portraying the characters. Oops!
24 A Link To The Future
The Legend of Zelda for NES introduced most of the features that we now take for granted in the series: the dungeons, the baddies, the evil Ganon, and the land of Hyrule. Most of these features were not even supposed to be in; the game was originally going to be set in the future, in some kind of cyberpunk universe. The concept art was done, and Link even got his name from the whole computer/technology concept, but Shigeru Miyamoto decided in the end that a medieval setting would be more appropriate to convey the rest of his ideas.
23 Will Anyone Think Of Poor Luigi?
Everyone who has played the game knows that Yoshi is in Super Mario 64, on top of the castle. He’s chilling there because he was originally going to be rideable, but it proved to be too awkward. Instead of deleting him, the team simply repurposed his 3D model.
On the other hand, not everyone knows that Luigi was also going to be in the game.
According to Miyamoto himself, he was only removed from the game in February 1996 due to memory issues. His 3D introduction was then delayed to the planned 64DD sequel, which was canceled when the add-on failed to sell in Japan.
22 Kamek The Kart-Driving Magikoopa
From the moment screenshots of Mario Kart 64 started appearing in magazines, the look of the game was already pretty much finalized. Most of the features were in place, except for one little detail. The roster of drivers was slightly different, with Kamek the Magikoopa appearing instead of Donkey Kong. DK wasn’t as much a part of Mario’s crew back then, while Kamek was fresh from his big Yoshi’s Island role. Donkey Kong replaced him in the final product, but Kamek’s go-kart dreams live on in old magazine screenshots from the late 90s.
21 The Perfect You
Perfect Dark for N64 is already a great game, but one feature which was advertised in Nintendo Power magazine was left out. The game was going to let players put themselves in the multiplayer mode by using the Game Boy Camera to map their face to their character’s. The feature was ready to go, but Rare canceled it. It is unclear what the real reason is: I have read that they feared that people could put non-PG images in the game, while this other source claims that it was due to the then-controversial nature of shooting actual people in a video game.
20 Super Mario Bros: The Inaccessible Levels
Super Mario Bros 3 is already the biggest Mario game on the NES, but it could have been even larger. SMB3 indeed has a bunch of beta levels that were cut from the final game. However, instead of being deleted, they were just made inaccessible;
Creative people have been able to hack the game’s rom to make them playable via emulators.
Most of these levels are unfinished, but some are complete and even pretty good. They even include new types of enemies unseen in the official release, such as a golden Cheep-Cheep which moves faster than the regular version.
19 The Ultimate Ultimate Alliance
Marvel Ultimate Alliance was ported to most consoles of its time, including the Wii. That version has an unfinished demo produced by Vicarious Visions which features Link and Samus Aran as guest characters, similar to what was done with Link in the Gamecube version of Soul Calibur 2. When the studio showed the demo to Nintendo, they expected it to please the company. Nintendo did not like it, and in fact, demanded the characters be removed immediately. Maybe it’s because the demo still had PlayStation 2 icons in it?
18 The Mystery Of Bond Man
A 1995 manga revealed that the first Mega Man was going to have a boss called Bond Man, based on the power of glue. This idea obviously terrible, and no artwork remains, except for that one sketch in the manga that was created from the description of a Capcom boss. Still, people love a mystery, and Bond Man gathered a fan base despite his stupid name. Fan art of Bond Man can now be seen all over the internet, to the point where he was almost added to the PSP title Mega Man Powered Up years later.
17 DENIED!
NBA Jam is famous for its secret characters, such as Bill Clinton or the NBA mascots. The Tournament Edition of the arcade game was going to have four Mortal Kombat characters.
This, unfortunately, came right in the middle of the “games are too violent” controversy of the mid-90s.
With gaming executives having to go in front of congress, the NBA ordered for the controversial characters to be removed. They still had time to make it to early NBA Jam TE machines, before being removed from a subsequent revision.
16 Linked To Link
Incredibly, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening originally had a two-players mode, which would have been played through the Game Boy’s Game Link cable. The great book Hyrule Historia has a sketch for a boss which could only be fought by two players, with a handwritten note that says “What are we gonna do about 1P mode?”. The multiplayer mode was so central to the concept that Nintendo hadn’t even considered someone could play solo. This was seen as too big of a problem, so the game was made exclusively single player.
15 Extra Contra Content
Unless you are a wizard, Contra for NES is difficult to finish without using the famous Konami code to add some much-needed extra lives to your game. What if the game had a stage select mode so you can restart where you lost your last life? Such a mode indeed exists… if you are Japanese. The secret feature was removed from the European and Western releases because we are made to suffer, I guess. Actually, the “why” of this decision was never explained. All we know is that it exists, and we can’t use it on our plain grey NES.
14 Please Mario Don’t Hurt ‘Em
Super Mario Bros. for the NES is one, if not the, most influential game of all time.
Would it have been the same way if, say, Mario was riding a rocket and shooting down enemies with a beam rifle?
Would it have been cooler, or would it have ruined the whimsical setting of the Mushroom Kingdom? According to early design documents, that’s exactly what was going to happen, until Shigeru Miyamoto found the mechanic to be too awkward. He cut it out in favour of more precise jumping, and the rest is history, as they say.
13 Fallout’s Racoon Problem
The first Fallout is already very dense in terms of content, so it’s understandable that a lot of everything had to be cut. One of these things is a race of mutated racoons, which were designed but ultimately cut from the final product. They had a backstory and everything, and even there are even design sketches available. Fallout’s creator Tim Caine felt they were out of place despite all the other mutants appearing on screen. They only survive through an in-game FEV disk file which describes the process behind the experiment which created them, though they never appear on screen.
12 Cut The Creep Out
The Japanese version of Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter includes a peculiar character named Norimaro, based on a character played by a Japanese comedian named Noritake Kinashi. Norimaro’s deal is that he’s a creep, with his backstory including stealing Chun Li’s underwear, and his Hyper Combo consisting of the guy getting a gigantic nosebleed when he thinks of his opponent’s fun bits. Norimaro was obviously cut from the Western version, although he is still in the game’s files and all of his moves have been translated. This shows that it was a decision taken very late in the localization process.
11 The Truth About Singing Mountain
Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack is really good. So good, in fact, that it was released on its own CD.
The soundtrack includes a track which is nowhere to be found in the game, called “Singing Mountain”.
Square has confirmed that the track was to be played during an extra dungeon set in the prehistoric era, although it was scrapped to make space for the Black Omen ship. An unfinished map of Singing Mountain was found in the data of a Japanese demo and has since been cleaned and uploaded to the internet.
10 No More Passwords For Metroid
The very first Metroid uses a password system to save a player’s game, which is annoying but does allow for an easier input of various cheats.The Japanese version, on the other hand, did not have a password system. Instead, it used the Famicom Disk Drive to write data on the game disks. Opening up the North American cartridge shows that there is a space on the game’s circuit board for a battery, the same one which is used to save your game in The Legend of Zelda. It’s unclear why they went with the clunkier password system over the battery in the end.
9 Now With 40% Less Content
Secret of Mana is a fun game which feels like it should have been longer. That’s because it originally was! The game was being developed for the planned SNES CD add-on, developed by Sony. The two Japanese giants went their separate way after a while, and Secret of Mana was now too massive for the poor SNES, and according to Koichi Ishii, had about 40% of its content cut to fit on a cartridge. Most of the content was stuff which focused on character development, which is why past a certain point, the game feels like a succession of palaces and nothing else.
8 Motorbikes Are Cool
Streets of Rage 3 is already a cool game, with the crazy techno soundtrack and the non-stop action. It is so cool, that a motorcycles-based stage had to be cut late during development, probably because that would have been too much cool for a single game. The unfinished level, still in the game code, would have seen the player ride a motorcycle while trying to dodge another rider who throws petrol bombs. If you do access the stage through unintended means, only the bad guy is visible; the player’s character isn’t.
7 The Unfinished Races
Gran Turismo 2 famously has a counter which indicates the percentage of completion of a player’s game. That counter cannot go higher than 98.2 percent, however, because the remaining content which would have given you that extra 1.8 percent was cut late in development. So late, that the counter was never readjusted. It has been speculated that the extra content was drag racing strips, while other sources which have broken through the code say these tracks never existed. The mystery still persists.
6 Finally, The Final Smash
The Final Smash, added to the popular series with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, is a life-saver for many casual player, and the scourge of many competitive ones.
The controversial mechanic could have been with the series from the start, according to Masahiro Sakurai himself.
Sakurai revealed that the Final Smash was originally slated to appear in the very first Super Smash Bros. Voice clips were even recorded for it, and some of those, including Captain Falcon’s and Ness’, are accessible through the first game’s debug menu.