Cabbage (lost build for cancelled Nintendo 64DD game; 1997)

Photo from the ‘97 Nintendo Magazine

Status: Lost

Cabbage is a codename for an unfinished cancelled game that was being developed by Shigesato Itoi, Tsunekazu Ishihara, and Shigeru Miyamoto. It was supposed to be revealed in Spaceworld 2000 before becoming cancelled and lost to time.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Development

Cabbage was announced in 1997 as a game in which players were able to raise, feed, and carry around a creature called “Cabbage.” Miyamoto stated that the game was in development for 5 years. The game would make use of the 64DD internal real-time clock, a hardware feature that was unique to video game consoles so it can keep the Cabbage creature and its virtual world running while the console is off. Furthermore, the game was gonna be allowed to have Game Boy connectivity via Transfer Pak, so the creature could be transferred in an interactive carrying basket game. At Space World 1997, Miyamoto describes features such as “giving it toys, swings, slides, ponds, and so forth. The team also proposed the ability to use a rewritable 64DD floppy disk' to swap the character’s toys between different players. Miyamoto only describes the game verbally withholding any real Cabbage Graphic.

1997 Interview

In an interview with 64Dream, Itoi states that HAL Labortory’s Satoru Iwata joined the project because...

"the tools they're using to make Cabbage are drastically modernizing. Making those tools is the most laborious part. So it looks like that part's finishing up."

Itoi also states that they were working on the project without supervision from Nintendo’s President.

2000

In 2000, Itoi gave an update on the game, stating that Miyamoto was looking forward and wanted to get something done relatively soon. It was planned to be playable at SpaceWorld 2000, but no demo, screenshots, or videos was ever revealed. According to Miyamoto though, it was because Itoi and Ishihara were occupied in other projects such as Mother 3.

Cancellation

In a 2006 interview, Miyamoto stated that Cabbage news stopped for so long that he considered it being canceled, but also revealed that gameplay concepts and elements from Cabbage were in Nintendogs, and had similarities to Animal Crossing.

Availability

No footage or images from the game have surfaced, but photos of Magazines that talked about Cabbage have been posted online. People do hope that Cabbage in some form, will see the light of day.