Super Mario World, Big Run, and SD Great Battle previews |
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These games were demonstrated at Nintendo's Shoshinkai show (more pics from the show here!). Many of the images below for SMB4 may have been recycled from Nintendo's SFC demonstration over a year before, but anyway, here are some more higher-quality pics from this alpha version. | Big Run was seen at Shoshinkai in a very early form, with a plain blue instrument panel and absolutely no on-screen obstacles. A 3-day tech demo, in other words. Needless to say, next to F-Zero this game quickly paled in comparison. |
SD The Great Battle is a bit different from the released version. We can see the life meter and text boxes have changed, and there is some debug location text on each screen here. | |
Here's an early version of that great game, Jerry Boy, as shown in September & October, 1990. The graphics at this time were more realistic, less cutesy. They later got changed in 1991 to reflect a far more hand-drawn/cel-animated art style. Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori hinted in an interview that because the early graphics (drawn by Epic/Sony artists probably) didn't match their designs and cel-based art style very well, they took over the pixel art themselves, resulting in the style of the game we see today.
Click inside the images to see close-ups!
The explanatory text doesn't say much, other than that the game is only completed up to the end of the 1st stage, pictured above. Likewise, the graphics and characters may [and did!] change before the final release. This article mentions that the game is designed by Satoshi Tojiri, a fellow magazine writer and eventual Pokemon creator.
Even more and more pictures of the earliest Jelly Bean:
A lot of those pictures are duplicated between magazines, meaning they are probably still images that Epic showed off to the press (and not a real game demo, I bet. Oh, well.)
More pictures, this time from the kinder, gentler Jerry Boy
version:
Alpha |
Beta |
Final |
I really like the blue vases in this early shot of ChouMakaiMura. Too bad they were taken out. (And the red clouds (?) in the background look good too.)
Here's R-Type II on the Super Famicom, before it became Super R-Type. This is still the first level, and it still has those 3 elevator things from the arcade game. They were quite different in Super R-Type.
EARLIER |