In the dying days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, well into the early 1990s, Taito had plans to bring arcade game Hit The Ice to the console with some pretty substantial additions. It never made it, but that wasnât for lack of effort; the game was actually completed, just never released.
https://kotaku.com/huge-nintendo-gigaleak-reveals-tons-of-snes-n64-secre-1844509739
As gaming historian Frank Cifaldi notes, among the terabytes of data comprising the Nintendo âgigaleakâ is the finished, signed-off NES port of Hit the Ice. Itâs not the first time weâve seen the game on the console, as a prototype version leaked a little while ago, but itâs still really interesting to see a gameâs development finish up, get approved for release and then…just never happen
Itâs not hard 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 game to instead (along with the Genesis, Game Boy and TurboGrafx).
Whatâs important about this, though, is that while the original arcade release was a sports game, and those later ports were also sports games, the NES version had RPG elements added to it in a âQuest Modeâ that let you wander around town, chatting with residents.
https://kotaku.com/someone-please-make-a-proper-sports-rpg-1516159980
Shame that got canned!I remember writing here a long time ago, before 2Kâs MyCareer really took off and we got stuff like The Journey in FIFA, that sports needed more RPG-type stuff. To have got some in 1993 would have been cool!
If you want to read up on exactly this RPG content would have included, Cifaldi wrote about it a while ago on lostlevels
