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Community dump of unreleased N64 title Mini Racers (Publisher: Nintendo)

S

Shiggy

Member
You might be aware that often prototypes and unreleased games leak out and get sold for a nice amount of money. Sometimes, there are generous people who want to make these titles available to public. Recent examples include a Glover N64 prototype as well as various Rare Ltd. prototypes (Banjo-Pilot, Diddy Kong Pilot).

So now someone bought two N64 racing prototypes for USD4500. These are Mini Racers & Tamiya Racing 64, both developed by Looking Glass Studios. The latter appears to be an early prototype of Mini Racers, which was finished but remained unpublished by Nintendo.

tamiya2.jpg

tamiya1.jpg

Glide64__12.png

lrg-1042-mini09.jpg

lrg-1044-mini11.jpg


Mini Racers is a cancelled 96Mbit multiplayer racing game that was in development by Looking Glass Studios for the Nintendo 64. The project was announced in 1998, but unfortunately it was delayed many times and in the end in was never released. Mini Racers was going to have a strong multiplayer mode, similar to Micromachines or RC PRO-AM, for up to four players, and it could have been an interesting addition to the already rich list of arcade racing games for the N64.

Mini Racers had several game modes in single and multiplayer, including a track editor to create your own course, and a random track generator. The radio-controlled cars could be given a turbo boost with a press of the Z button. N64 Magazine played an early version are voiced their frustration at the poor camera, though when they next played it at Spaceworld 1999 they noted the angle and viewing distance were now configurable and could even be played in a top-down view. Most likely the game was cancelled because it was shown in the final days of the Nintendo 64, when the new 128-bit consoles were almost out.
Click to expand...
http://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/04/mini-racer/


Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONQw-nzpiyk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RuCoMhx1KQI
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/685/xymi.mp4/


The buyer is asking for USD1250 of his USD4500 investment in order to actually dump the prototypes.
http://www.nesworld.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1332443501/2#0
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
What a shame this wasn't released. Looks like it could have been incredibly fun and fit in perfectly with the N64's group of 4-player classics.
 
B

BruiserBear

Banned
I remember being hyped for Mini Racers back in the day, and was very disappointed when it was cancelled. I'm assuming Nintendo just didn't feel it turned out good enough to bother releasing.
 
T

Typographenia

Member
I might be delussional, but I'm wanting to say I remember seeing something about Mini-Racers in Nintendo Power. That, or it was a game that looked really similar.
 
B

Brera

Banned
Pretty surerev limit got released and was pretty shitty?

Can't believe I thought that was going to be our ridge racer!
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
Oh wow, Mini Racers might get released? This has been one of my most wanted undumped games for years now, so it'd be just fantastic if it releases... why Nintendo passed on releasing a completed game I have no idea (and no, it's not because the N64 was dead by the time it was done, Looking Glass shut down in 2000, before the N64's death...), but it was really annoying. It'd be better if it'd actually been released, but I'd love to play it because I love top-down racing games like this, and this always looked like a good one. Here's hoping they raise the money.
 
element

element

Member
I'm still shocked that Mini Racers was canned. It was DONE. I worked at Looking Glass Seattle while it was being made in Boston and we played it a tons there. I think it was weeks from going to submission and Nintendo pulled the plug on the project.
 
K

Kyoufu

Member
I remember I was excited for this, but I was very young so I was literally excited for anything shown in magazines.
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
element said:
I'm still shocked that Mini Racers was canned. It was DONE. I worked at Looking Glass Seattle while it was being made in Boston and we played it a tons there. I think it was weeks from going to submission and Nintendo pulled the plug on the project.
Click to expand...

That's really too bad... :(

But yeah, I know there were quite a few canned first-party-published N64 games, but as far as I know Mini Racers was the only one cancelled at completion... that, and not releasing Sin & Punishment in the US, are perhaps NOA's two most mystifying decisions from that period, I think. I can better understand passing on Animal Crossing (how long would translation have taken...), but those two?
 
B

BoobPhysics101

Banned
element said:
I'm still shocked that Mini Racers was canned. It was DONE. I worked at Looking Glass Seattle while it was being made in Boston and we played it a tons there. I think it was weeks from going to submission and Nintendo pulled the plug on the project.
Click to expand...

You worked at Looking Glass? Fucking awesome!!!
 
S

SovanJedi

provides useful feedback
That looked like bucketloads of fun! Why did it get cancelled? :(

Next: the original Wave Race 64 with the morphing craft and navigating canals, please.
 
H

Hero of Legend

Member
I know one mysterious N64 game I would kill to see any real gameplay off;

Catroots by Marigul, but Marigul was an umbrella of studios, so if any, it probably was Noise as the style kinda reminds me of Custom Robo.

All we got was a partial off-screen vid of the video footage, it looked crazy, like Itchy & Scratchy, could've made a neat, quirky game that Marigul's studios were known for.

Also, another Marigul studio which was shutdown before they even released its first game; Echo Delta by Clever Trick.

No clue who Clever Trick was, at least we know at least vaguely who the other folks are/were; Ambrella is a Pokemon studio, Noise made Custom Robo, Param was basically of Artdink descent, and Saru Brunei was headed by someone who was apparently Miyamoto's right-hand man for 15 years (where the hell is he now?).

But Clever Trick? Who? Exactly.

Echo Delta apparently was like 90% done and even had a cart on eBay a number of years ago, but it was never heard from afterwards...
 
S

Shiggy

Member
90/1250 USD!

Please make a donation (well, I should do it too :D).
His Paypal email address is olivieryuyu@yahoo.fr
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
element said:
Looking Glass Seattle was a bit different then Looking Glass Boston. We made Destruction Derby 64 and Wild Waters (which was canned due to the studio closing).
Click to expand...

Destruction Derby 64... I got that one not long ago. It's alright, but way too easy most of the time... the decision to have four cars, including yours, going in one direction, while eight go in the other direction, ensures that you'll almost certainly be the winner of any race you survive... this doesn't apply to the arena matches of course, or that one track where six cars start in each direction, but for the rest I found it to be an issue, though the game does finally get a bit harder in the last difficulty level.

Also, it was kind of too bad that it has fewer cars in each race than the PS1 Destruction Derby games have, though 12's still a decent number. At least the graphics are certainly far better... and yeah, it is fun despite these issues. But anyway, that's a different game.

As for Wild Waters, I don't remember hearing too much about that one.

Hero of Legend said:
I know one mysterious N64 game I would kill to see any real gameplay off;

Catroots by Marigul, but Marigul was an umbrella of studios, so if any, it probably was Noise as the style kinda reminds me of Custom Robo.

All we got was a partial off-screen vid of the video footage, it looked crazy, like Itchy & Scratchy, could've made a neat, quirky game that Marigul's studios were known for.

Also, another Marigul studio which was shutdown before they even released its first game; Echo Delta by Clever Trick.

No clue who Clever Trick was, at least we know at least vaguely who the other folks are/were; Ambrella is a Pokemon studio, Noise made Custom Robo, Param was basically of Artdink descent, and Saru Brunei was headed by someone who was apparently Miyamoto's right-hand man for 15 years (where the hell is he now?).

But Clever Trick? Who? Exactly.

Echo Delta apparently was like 90% done and even had a cart on eBay a number of years ago, but it was never heard from afterwards...
Click to expand...
Echo Delta looked very cool, yeah. I didn't know it was actually 90% done though, I thought it was cancelled before that. It was one of the victims of Nintendo's rapidly fading interest in publishing for the N64 in 2001 though, for sure. Too bad, I'd have loved to see another RTS on the system.

As for the rest of that though, I don't think I knew any of that.
 
Chittagong

Chittagong

Gold Member
Wow, always wondered what happened for this game. It really interested me, and now finally with Motorstorm RC I can prove that I was onto something with my excitement for Mini Racers.

My most wanted unsurfaced N64 games come from the NCL release list they publicized by accident

- Cabbage
- Climber
- Mother 64
 
Dr. Zoidberg

Dr. Zoidberg

Member
SovanJedi said:
Next: the original Wave Race 64 with the morphing craft and navigating canals, please.
Click to expand...

THAT'S what I always wanted. I had a little QuickTime movie of the original Waverace 64 and while the final product was a classic in its own right, it never lived up to the promise of that tiny clip I watched 50 times. But then, Hydro Thunder came out and it was basically the same kind of thing.
 
riskVSreward

riskVSreward

Member
Well, I think Sega claimed that the DC was 128 bit... But the pc nerd in me refuses to believe that there's any need for a processor that big.
 
B

Bending_Unit_22

Member
riskVSreward said:
Well, I think Sega claimed that the DC was 128 bit... But the pc nerd in me refuses to believe that there's any need for a processor that big.
Click to expand...

Just a convention that used to mean something but was carried forward when it no longer mattered. By old conventions the Dreamcast was 32-bit so no it wasn't needed, but something was 128-bit (memory interface for the GPU?). I recall reading around that time that using a similar stretched definition of "bits" the PS2 could have been called a 2048-bit system or something similarly ridiculous.
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
Ninja Scooter said:
I think Riqa eventually turned into that ultra generic shooter Rogue Ops for PS2/GC/Xbox.
Click to expand...

I don't know if it turned into it, but that game was made by the studio that had been working on Riqa, yes.

N4Us said:
This game sounded insane in the previews I read for it way back when. I guess they just didn't have a solid plan for the game though.

Similarly I was looking forward to Desert Island 64 after a brief description of it in one magazine, but I never heard from it again.

http://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/04/desert-island-64dd-unreleased/
Click to expand...

That game does sound cool, too bad it never happened. There were so many canned N64 games... :(
 
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