Earthbound 64, whatever happened there
Nintendo being retarded with releasing the 64DD fucked it and a bunch of games over. I've already said this in other threads related to it but essentially the 64DD was supposed to release in early to mid 1997, it was fully completed and ready to go they even had it up and running at various trade shows. Instead of just releasing it though Nintendo was really scared about it not having enough launch titles. Almost every developer that made anything for Nintendo 64 had at least one game being worked on for the 64DD at the time sometimes several(Almost every Rare game on the system began it's life as a 64DD game because they kept assuming it would finally release by the time they finished their next game), whether it was an expansion disk for a cartridge game or a brand new game entirely, but because Nintendo kept pushing back the release date those devs would in turn delay or even just cancel their games, or hastily scale them down and release on cartridge. Some games were just too deep in the trenches on 64DD to be scaled down and shoved on a cartridge and Mother 3 was a casualty of this.There's a lot of misinformation out there that 64DD never released because it was "a failure in Japan" but that's not really the case. It released in December 1999 in Japan, basically the beginning of the systems final year of life, it never would have came out here by then anyway even if it randomly took off. It was also only available via mail order and it being sold at all was basically just Nintendo trying to recoup the costs of all the units and couple of games they had already produced, it wasn't really meant to succeed necessarily at that point.It will forever be one of the most interesting periods of gaming history for me, there's so much weird ephemera around the whole thing, lost games that still get uncovered and are still yet to even be seen, old builds of games before they got put on cartridge, and hell the stuff that did end up releasing is pretty strange too.
I don't exactly like Mother 3 but Earthbound 64 didn't look very good.
>>12262726I didn't really keep up with games news until 2001, but going back and looking through magazines from the late 90's was very illuminating.>the 64DD was constantly getting hyped up, new games announced, new features announced>games journos were excited, then less excited, then irritated, then downright resentful, then completely forgot the 64DD was even a concept
>>12262738It really would have changed the entire trajectory of the N64 had it released on time. The disks were much cheaper to produce than cartridges and held 64mb by default, N64 carts didn't hit 64mb until the very end of the systems life even 32mb wasn't common until late 98, and they were still expensive to manufacture. That and the possibility to take advantage of the disk rewritability and real time clock for game mechanics as well as even multiple disks would've been complete game changers. I think all the time about how much bigger and more ambitious something like Ocarina of Time would have been had it released on 64DD as intended and that game was already critically acclaimed and revolutionary as is. The possibilities that never were...
did anything more ever leak of eb64? like did we ever get any data files? would be kino to see if any levels or models could be looked at
>>12262791You can see every 64DD disk thats been found so far here: https://64dd.org/database.html#retailSome interesting stuff is 2 Banjo Kazooie disks from 1997 not a playable build but has a lot of early assets, the Mario 64 demo disk used to show the 64DD off at Spaceworld which is the same as the final game but has some higher quality music and mostly was just used to show how load times were pretty comparable to cartridge, early builds of the Mario Artist games, and some other stuff. There's still a lot more things to find, they're definitely out there.
>>12262691People say 2000 election or 9/11 is the infliction point for where things get bad but Earthbound 64 being delayed and then canned is the real infliction point. In the good timeline we would've gotten it.
