/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9640794
There's been some evidence in recent years that the current Halberd design was actually something salvaged from an iteration of Kirby GCN, back when Sakurai most likely directed it since it was supposed to come out after Air Ride (around the time he left HAL).

Kirby for GameCube. I didn't find out about it until about a year after it was announced, and was pretty mad when I realized it was probably never coming out, because it looked stellar to my eyes. Yes, I know Kirby's Return to Dreamland is kind of the culmination of it, but I kind of prefer the vibe they were going for with the original concept.

ITT, discuss games with a prolonged, difficult or tortured development cycle - the ones which entered development hell and came out as glorious masterpieces in spite of it, the ones which showed promise but ended up suffering numerous compromises throughout the cycle and came out flawed or outright terrible, and the ones which never made it out of the prototype stage at all.

Pic related is admittedly barely retro by this board's current rules, especially given what it more or less ended up becoming is not retro at all, but I think it's a good example all the same. It was going to be one of the GameCube's final swan songs, until Sakurai left HAL and the game ended up in limbo for years, going through a few different iterations until emerging as Kirby's Return to Dreamland on the Wii. IMO it looked more interesting in this initial stage than in the final version, though not to say it ended up bad by any means.