[GBA] Diddy Kong Pilot - Unreleased

[GBA] Diddy Kong Pilot - Unreleased

November 21st, 2011, 22:51 Posted By: wraggster

Via Nintendomax comes awesome news of a game that was an unreleased commercial game from Rare

Today we've got quite an interesting one, it's Diddy Kong Pilot. I bought this cartridge from a fellow collector about 3-4 months ago, back then I didn't know it was unreleased nor much beta, I just wanted to obtain some items from Rare. I'm not sure how far it is in development though.

I decided to contact a couple of former employee's I know and hear what they could say about the development cycle of the game. The information is quite interesting as well.
I want to thank both Paul and Jens for sharing the information to go alongside this page. I will update this page throughout the week with screenshots, pictures of the cartridge, etc.

Quote content originally posted by: Jens
‪The original design brief was a mix between racing and adventure sections, a bit like pilot wings with the flying sections from diddy kong racing. A key feature was going to be the tilt control. You were meant to hold the GBA like a steering wheel, and management was quite keen on doing something like that FMV shooter Iridion 3D that was released on GBA.‬

‪We found quite early on that the concept was highly inappropriate for the hardware, and that the tilt control didn't work even remotely as well as management imagined.‬

‪It was originally going to use Mario characters as well as DKC characters.‬ ‪2-3 month in we had a prototype, and while we on the team saw nothing but problems management always insisted that it was going well. Sigh.‬

Around the time of the Spaceworld version we got feedback from Nintendo which pretty much covered my concerns: Tilt is not working well, a racing game with planes is pointless if you don't have a 3D world, the GBA's LCD is not well suited in situations where the GBA is not held perfectly in line with a light source, etc. Instead of doing the sensible thing of cancelling the game, or allowing us to drop tilt and make a game more in line with the hardware capabilities we got scheduled to get it finished by October. To do that we still needed multiplayer, finish off racing and implement dozens of adventure levels that would all require individual programming. Additionally we had several people from management micro-managing us into different directions, disregarding any hardware or cartridge space limitations.

Around October the first designer and the artists were taken off the team. The artists were merged into the Sabrewulf and Grunty's Revenge teams, the designer was made redundant. The other programmer and me joined the team led by Martin Wakeley, and we continued under his lead. All the adventure elements were dropped, and only the racing sections remained. Additionally we eventually removed the tilt control.

Martin was a lot more senior than the first designer, and was able to deflect a lot of the bullshit and micromanagement. We got most of the game implemented by about May-June the next year. Unfortunately this was when management started to spend most of their time on the sale of Rare to various publishers. Nintendo had a version of the game, but because of all the work involved with the sale of Rare, and with other projects they were involved with, we didn't get a response from them for a long time. They ultimately decided against publishing it.

Around the time when we had to sign new contracts with Microsoft I confronted Chris Stamper about the game and its future, and I was eventually allowed to start a new game (Battletoads GBA) while DKP was waiting for Nintendo's decision.

‪Martin left Rare around October that year, and shortly after that DKP was shelved. A few months later it was restarted by another team as Banjo Pilot, who went through a total rewrite and a voxel version until they finally took my last version and changed the sprites into Banjo.‬ ‪I hope that helps.‬

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