In the final days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, in the early 1990s, Taito had plans to bring the arcade game. Hitting the ice to the console with some pretty substantial additions. She never did it, but that was not for lack of effort; the game was actually completed, but was never released.
As game historian Frank Cifaldi points out, among the terabytes of data that make up the Nintendo “gigaleak” is the terminated and signed NES port of Hitting the ice. It is not the first time that we see the game on the console, since A prototype version of the game was recently leakedBut it’s still really interesting to see a game’s development finish, get approval for its release, and then … just never launch.
It is not difficult to see why. For the moment Hitting the ice was ready for the NES was 1993 and that was well in the SNES generation, a platform to which Taito would eventually port the game (along with Genesis, Game Boy, and TurboGrafx).
However, what’s important about this is that while the original arcade release was a sports game, and those later ports were also sports games, the NES version had RPG elements added to it in a “Search mode” that allows you to walk around the city, chatting with residents.
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What a shame it has been canned! I remember writing here a long time ago, before 2K’s MyCareer really took off and we got things like Trip in FIFA, that sports needed more RPG type things. Having some in 1993 would have been great!
If you want to read exactly about this RPG content I would have included, Cifaldi wrote about this a while ago in the Lostlevels..
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