Cooly Skunk (found build of unreleased Super Famicom port of platformer; 1995)

Title screen.

Status: Found

Date found: 19 Jan 2020

Cooly Skunk (クーリースカンク Kūrī Sukanku), known in the USA as Punky Skunk, is a 1996 PlayStation platform video game developed by Ukiyotei and published in Japan by Visit and in the USA by Jaleco USA.^[1] The player controls an anthropomorphic skunk, Cooly (Punky in USA version), who needs to save the world from the evil Wolf Pack. Its game plays much like other side-scrolling action games, featuring a set of special tools such as a skunk spray, digging claws, and a snowboard. Although it was released for the PlayStation, it seems that the game was unfinished.

This game was originally planned to release for the Super Famicom on February 23rd, 1996, at 9,300 yen. The game was shown at the Shoshinkai 1995 event, but it was cancelled likely due to the new PlayStation and Sega Saturn consoles, that "killed" the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis market.

Only some screenshots and no prototypes or other information of the original unreleased Super Famicom version have resurfaced. However, on November 16th, 2019, someone found a Satellaview 8M cartridge (which had the game inside) being sold for a high price at Super Potato in Akihabara, confirming that game had a BSX broadcast as a demo for some time.^[2] Unfortunately, no one, including the poster who made the discovery bought the cartridge.

Afterward, no more information had given about the cart till January 18th, 2020, when Forest of Illusion made contact with the current owner, and the owner said he would sell the cartridge for $355. Forest of Illusion posted a Twitter post asking people to donate, and they reached the goal in less than an hour.^[3]

On January 19th, 2020, the ROM was released on Gaming Alexandria's website (with the help of user "sammaiwashi").^[4]^[5] In this build, the game would let a player play the first three worlds and then boot them back to the title screen. Later that same day, Twitter user "MasterF0x" made a Twitter post explaining that they made a hack that would let the player play beyond the third world.^[6] On February 1st, 2020, romhacking.net user "Psyklax" released an English translation of MasterF0x's hack. ^[7]