In the dying days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, well into the early 1990s, Taito had strategies to bring the arcade game Hit The Ice to the console with some pretty considerable additions. It never made it, however that wasnt for lack of effort; the game was in fact completed, just never ever released.
As gaming historian Frank Cifaldi notes, among the terabytes of data consisting of the Nintendo “gigaleak” is the completed, signed-off NES port of Hit the Ice. Its not the very first time weve seen the game on the console, as a prototype variation of the video game leaked a bit back, but its still truly fascinating to see a video games development end up, get authorized for release and after that … simply never release.
Its not tough seeing why. By the time Hit The Ice was ready for the NES it was 1993, and that was well into the SNES generation, a platform Taito would eventually port the video game to instead (along with the Genesis, Game Boy and TurboGrafx).
Whats important about this, though, is that while the initial game release was a sports game, and those later ports were also sports games, the NES version had RPG elements included to it in a “Quest Mode” that let you roam around town, talking with homeowners.
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Shame that got canned! I keep in mind writing here a long period of time ago, before 2Ks MyCareer really removed and we got stuff like The Journey in FIFA, that sports needed more RPG-type things. To have actually got some in 1993 would have been cool!
Cifaldi composed about it a while ago on lostlevels if you desire to read up on exactly this RPG material would have consisted of.
