A Nintendo 64 game that never saw the light of day 25 years ago has finally been released. While every video game console in history has a long list of games that ended up being canceled for one reason or another, the N64 has some of the most infamous cancellations ever. Titles like Dinosaur Planet, DOOM Absolution, Earthbound 64, and Fire Emblem 64 were all unveiled in some capacity but were later scrapped before they could finish development. Now, one game that actually did reach the end of its development but never hit store shelves has been unearthed and has been released in an unofficial capacity.
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Coming by way of YouTube channel Hard4Games, the game Viewpoint 2064 has finally been let loose on the Internet Archive. Developed by Sammy Corporation, Viewpoint 2064 is an on-rails shooter similar to Nintendo’s Star Fox and was meant to be a sequel to the Neo Geo title Viewpoint. Shown off to the public at Nintendo’s Space World convention in 1999, Viewpoint 2064 ended up vanishing and was never actually released.
Back in 2020, a beta version of Viewpoint 2064 was discovered which gave N64 fans a greater idea of what the game would have been like. Now, some five years later, a “master” version of Viewpoint 2064 has been discovered and shows us that the project was essentially completed. While it may have never received a proper release on Nintendo 64 consoles, the game has now been saved and will remain accessible in the years to come thanks to the unearthing of this master edition cartridge.
This situation with Viewpoint 2064 is a bit similar to Nintendo’s Star Fox 2, which was previously in the works for SNES. While the game was eventually canceled and never released, the final version was essentially done but was scrapped at the last minute. Some 20 years later, Nintendo finally released Star Fox 2 officially through the Super Nintendo Classic mini-console. Viewpoint 2064 isn’t getting the same pomp and circumstance with its own release, but it’s still now playable to the public for the first time.
While it’s great to see that Viewpoint 2064 has been saved, there are still plenty of other Nintendo 64 games that were essentially completed that remain inaccessible. Hopefully, more of these scrapped projects will begin to emerge in similar ways in the years to come.
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[H/T GamesRadar]
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