This could have been another N64 Rare classic. It looks like a great game! Why was it, it was never released?
Rare were just too worried that it would just get forgotten on a console with so many good 3d platformers. An interesting thing is finding out the intense rivalry between the two rareware dev teams, one of them doing banjo and I guess the conker team juat wanted to outshine them!
You know you are going to have a great game if you are going to outshine Banjo! So sad that this game never saw the light of day :/
Might have been from the copy that sold into private hands, not sure. I think I've heard that copy went to Nintendomad, and after his passing there's been no word as to where it ended up. Another user might have more information to offer, though.
There's still zero confirmation Nintendomad ever had a copy. That 30 minute video is sourced from an old VHS that was given to the press. If you look for snippets on Youtube from IGN for example you'll find small areas of the videos taken from this one. A lot of old video back them seems to have been sourced from this tape.
Like a B-Roll? Thanks for the info. Yeah, I wasn't sure where that copy ended up. I guess the scuttlebutt/rumor was that he ended up with it.
As the animator said in the video, it was massively retooled into CBFD (which has been rereleased twice now). It does look like a really nice game, but the one we got was great too.
It was really nice of them to share what could have been and they were right about it being starved for attention. It may not have been the N64 game everyone wanted but it was the game the N64 needed.
I don't think they can legally release any N64 ROM by themselves, as these are built against Nintendo's development libraries, which are their property and anything containing them would have to be approved by Nintendo in order to go. What Rare now has probably done is wrote a wrapper much like you can find "Glide wrappers" in order to translate the calls to the original libraries into something else, so they can recompile the code of their games against it and have it run on the xbox-one, windows or whatever else, which, given the circumstances, will be at the very least, an MS owned platform. As far as I undertand, not even the non-remastered n64 games in RareReplay can be proper N64 ROMs and an emulator, but straight ports, recompilations against a compatible environment/library. It COULD be that they are running an N64 hardware emulator, but even in that case, licensing issues would probably require that they crafted their own N64-compatible replacement library to put in place of Nintendo's, and I'm suspecting they haven't really gone for that, as it would be much more complex and less advantageous for their goals or re-releasing their games on current platforms. No, I think the wrapper strategy is far more convenient for them and that's probably what they have done. All the new N64 footage in their Rare-Revealed videos has probably been done that way. As for other platforms, like NES and SNES, these were usually done in assembly, or bare C, if at all. I understand that general purpose libraries didn't make all that much of a sense in such limited platforms, as they would eat way too much space and performance. This means that, for these platforms, there's no library licensing issues to overcome in most cases.
I honestly think after watching this video and dream video rareware has kept these beta builds just laying around (she does say they got the conker footage from a copy out of the archives). It's obvious this is running on an emulator. I don't think any of these protos came from the Stampers cause they are not thanked at all in the credits. Conker had a lot of interesting ideas and design going for it, but even when I saw it magazines at that time I felt like it was just another cute platform that didn't quite stick out. In fact magazines really wouldn't show many pictures of it. As for releasing it there really shouldn't be any issues since you got 64 games running on the xbox one through an emu. But cause of the state this build is in it probably would crash on emus and based on the footage there is some slight graphical glitching due to an emu being used. I know in an interview that was strangely with Amazon.com the developers mentioned they have a development version that will never be released to the public which is probably this one. Gotta admit the facial expressions stuck out more in this early version.
