Cancelled Super NES Games

Briefly revealed in gaming publications, Kid Kirby was a prequel to the Kirby series starring Kirby as a baby. It was developed by DMA Design, who also developed Lemmings and Uniracers.

While very few details are known about the gameplay, a former DMA employee revealed official artwork and maps from the game.

The game was designed to be played with the SNES Mouse, but as sales of the mouse were declining, Nintendo wanted the game to play with a controller instead. The gameplay suffered as a result, and the game was eventually cancelled.

Sound Fantasy was an early rhythm game played with the Super NES Mouse. It starred colourful bug characters, each with a music-based minigame. Sound Fantasy was designed by sound artist Toshio Iwai, who would later design Nintendo DS title Electroplankton.

Pix Quartet Choose 4 bugs (out of 16) each representing a musical instrument. The bugs crawl over the TV screen while you draw a picture out of coloured lines in the background. Each time a bug crawls over a line, a musical note plays.

Beat Hopper You play as a grasshopper on a pogo stick. The level is made up of numbered blocks representing drum beats. The aim is to clear all of the blocks by jumping on them the same number of times as the number on the top without falling off the stage.

Ice Sweeper Control paddles using the Mouse, and use them to bounce the bug to break all of the coloured musical bubbles. The gameplay is similar to Alleyway.

Star Fly Light up Stars, each representing musical notes, and create your own music box style sounds.

The game was so far along in its development that Japanese and U.S. boxart had been created for the game. It's unknown why the game was cancelled. Many of the ideas were later revived and released in the game SimTunes (PC), developed by Toshio Iwai and Maxis.

Created by Nintendo and Argonaut, the developers of the original Star Fox.

Star Fox 2 expanded the original Star Fox team, introduced the rival team Star Wolf, and changed the gameplay from a linear progression through stages to a strategy-style game where you defended Corneria and rescued other planets by clearing missions in battle arenas.

The new models of Arwing were capable of more complex movement, and could transform into ground-based walkers. The aim of planetary missions was to take out the enemy forces or hit a number of targets in order to make a switch appear. As a walker, you could hit the switch and enter the enemy base in order to take out the power core.

On the map screen, enemy ships and missiles would hurtle towards Corneria, and you would have to intercept them to prevent the home planet from taking too much damage. If it took too much damage and fell to the forces of Andross, the game was over.

Star Fox 2 was completed, previewed at trade shows and had been featured in numerous magazine articles. The game was due to be released in 1995, however by that time the Nintendo 64 had been revealed. Nintendo were keen to only promote the N64 as the 3D system and the game was eventually cancelled.

Many of the ideas used in Star Fox 2 survived. Shigeru Miyamoto admitted that around 30% of the content of Star Fox 64 was adapted from Star Fox 2. Dylan Cuthbert (formerly of Argonaut) revealed that some of Star Fox 2's programming was used in Super Mario 64, such as the camera. Dylan Cuthbert would later go on to found Q-Games, and revived the map strategy elements of Star Fox 2 in Star Fox Command.

In 2017, Nintendo released Star Fox 2 on the Super NES Classic Edition.