The Battletoads Game Boy Advance Project Rare Never Finished
Battletoads is remembered as Rare's punishing 1991 brawler, but the studio also started a version for the Game Boy Advance. It was cancelled after only a few weeks of work, and for years nobody outside Rare had seen it. In late 2011 a Rare fan site made an unfinished prototype public, which showed that a GBA sequel or remake had once been on the table.
At a glance
- Developer: Rare (project cancelled)
- Surfaced: 2011, through the fan site RareWare Central
- Genre: Beat 'em up
- What sets it apart: Nothing here is final; animation, enemy behaviour and sound are all placeholders
What the prototype shows
- The team spent only a few weeks on it, so character animations, enemy AI and sound effects were stand-ins.
- The brief was loose. Instructions to the developers ranged from making a polished clone of the NES game to simply doing whatever seemed best, with the ambitious ideas reserved for a possible Xbox version.
- The character look blended the sometimes conflicting ideas of the original artists, who by then led other teams.
- A contemporary write-up described a restyled, skateboarder-flavoured toad design and a gentler difficulty than the NES original.
A different kind of Battletoads
This is a curiosity rather than the finished game, and it is not the NES classic with its Turbo Tunnel. If you collect cancelled or unreleased handheld projects, it is a small window into a direction the series never took.