Yoshi Racers (non-existent prototype for Argonaut Super Nintendo pitch; 1994)
Yoshi in Super Mario 64.
Status: Non-existent
After they successfully released the Super FX chip-enhanced game Star Fox in collaboration with Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993, British game developer Argonaut Games came up with the idea for a virtually new type of game: a 3D platformer.
Supposedly, they threw together a prototype of this genre featuring Nintendo's character Yoshi.
When they showed Nintendo the game, Nintendo rejected it, not willing to take the risk of entering an entirely new field with an outside developer.
This was the final blow to the two companies' relationship, as Nintendo soon released their own 3D platformer for the new Nintendo 64 console, Super Mario 64, which ended up using several of the ideas Argonaut implemented in their Yoshi prototype. Shigeru Miyamoto later apologized to them. However, this story is most likely untrue due to multiple factors.
The pitch became widely known to the public after the website Eurogamer mentioned it in an article about Argonaut's and Nintendo's partnership on Star Fox.[1] While the Eurogamer article describes the game as a platformer, a 2005 post on a fansite of the Croc video game series[2] (The author claimed to have visited Argonaut's office in 1999) and a post by an Argonaut employee on the message board NeoGaf[3] instead refers to it as a racing game. The NeoGaf post also claims the game was named Yoshi Racing.
Non-existence confirmed
On May 12th, 2024, DidYouKnowGaming, a YouTube channel which covers various topics around video games, released a video verifying multiple rumors surrounding cancelled Mario projects, with one of them being Yoshi Racing. In their research, they were able to verify many aspects of the pitch, with the main one being that while the project did exist, it wasn't anything playable and were just test animations. They also mention that, according to an anonymous developer, the pitch was called Yoshi Racers and not Yoshi Racing.
Videos
See Also
References
- ↑ A Eurogamer article on the making of Star Fox, which mentions Yoshi Racing (not as a racer but as a platformer). Retrieved 29 Jan '17
- ↑ An archived page of a Croc fansite which talks about the prototype. Retrieved 29 Jan '17
- ↑ A NeoGaf forum post that mentions the prototype. Retrieved 29 Jan '17