Battletoads was a series of beat 'em up games developed by Rare that made its debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1991. The games featured antropomorphic toads that were heavily inspired by the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and are considered, even to this day, some of the most difficult games ever made—especially the original one on the NES.
During an interview with RareFanDaBase, former Rare developer Paul Machacek opens up and talks about one of the projects that were cancelled when he was still developing for Rare. It turns out that a
Battletoads for the Game Boy was 100% complete and it was canned due to the arcade version of said game had underperformed.
"
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", said Machacek when asked if he had any fond memories of any canned projects that didn't come to fruition.
The
Super Battletoads game for the Game Boy was actually a port of the
Super Battletoads Arcade game that came out in 1994. The arcade version was actually published by Electronic Arts but he mentions Tradewest because those were the ones in charge of publishing the games on Nintendo consoles.
Battletoads actually got a Game Boy release in 1991 and, while it had the same name of the original game on the NES, it was a completely different game with brand new levels and a different story.
What's even more interesting is that they actually found the finished version of the game a few years ago and, to everyone's surprise, it worked.
"
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!"
Machacek seemed to be the only one who remembered about the existence of
Super Battletoads for the Game Boy, a game that no one had seen in over 22 years. Since they wanted to know if the game was 100% complete with everything still there, Machacek mentions that he still had the game's sourcecode—which was going to be of great help given how hard those
Battletoads games were.
"
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".
It really is a fascinating story, and is also quite frustrating that the game was indeed ready to be released and the publisher decided to can the whole series due to the poor sales of the
Super Battletoads Arcade. The series was very difficult and it's somewhat understandble that people were losing interest in it, although most people remember the games fondly...except for those bike sections(older fans know what I'm talking about).
Luckily, a new
Battletoads game was
announced during this year's E3 and, while we still don't know much about the game, it will sure garner some attention from older players who grew up with the series(like myself) who will finally get a proper
Battletoads game that is long overdue.