Jack and the Beanstalk (lost early Nintendo 64DD build of “Pokémon Snap”; 1995-1998)
A logo that appeared at the intro that could possibly be the main team behind the project
Status: Lost
Pokémon Snap is a first-person photography game created by HAL Laboratories in 1999. It’s a spin-off to the Pokémon series, being the first console-based and featuring many Pokémons in 3D for the first time.
However, Pokémon Snap wasn’t originally a Pokémon game and instead was a game based on the fairy tale, “Jack and The Beanstalk”.
Background
Jack and The Beanstalk was being developed on the second floor of the Nintendo Kanda building, being under the supervision of HAL Laboratories.[1] It was being made by a team lead by Youichi Yamamoto. Yamamoto was selected to work on the project with four other important Nintendo figures:
- Shigesato Itoi
- Satoshi Iwata
- Kouichi Nakamura
- Shigeru Miyamoto[1]
The game was slated to be a brand new type of game, and one to utilize the Nintendo 64DD to its full extent. Though the game was never completed, but it’s presumed that the plot was gonna be like the fairy tale, “Jack and The Beanstalk”. Many of its flagships then found their way to different games, one of them being Pokémon Snap. Though Yamamoto wasn’t a big fan about this, quote:
Game designer Masanobu Yamamoto was working on Pokémon Snap, and he initially had a negative reaction to the addition of Pokémon, because the characters replaced what he was working on. “That time, adopting the Pokémon world clarified what we should do and the direction we should head,” Yamamoto adds, “and I came to like Pokémon, so I felt like that had saved us.”[2]
Other features could’ve evolved into another game being Earthbound 64 as the N64DD internal clock was gonna be use for the growth of the planted seeds.[1] It is also likely that the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask used the three-day system, Jack and The Beanstalk was gonna use. Though in the intro for Pokémon Snap, a logo for a team named “Jack and Beans“ was shown along with the HAL and Nintendo logo.[3] And it’s believed that this name was the name for the main team behind the game which had the same director, “Yamamoto” that lead the project[4]
Availability
As of December 2023, no images or footage from the game has resurfaced.