Argonaut pitched a 3D Yoshi platformer [up: or racing game?]

Glowsquid

Glowsquid

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Eurogamer recently published an article on Argonaut's involvement on the original Star Fox. Admist various interesting tidbits about that game and some rather serious accusations leveled at Nintendo (Company sure has a torid history with British developers, eh?), there's this intriguing factoid:

"The end came when we pitched to do a 3D platform game, the likes of which had never been done before. We mocked up a prototype using Yoshi. It was essentially the world's first 3D platform game and was obviously a big risk - Nintendo had never let an outside company use their characters before, and weren't about to, either. This is the moment the deal fell apart. We later made that game into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC, which became our biggest ever game in terms of sales and also in royalties, since we owned the IP."

The similarity between Croc and Super Mario 64 isn't lost on San, who feels that the early prototype had some influence on the seminal N64 title. "Miyamoto-san went on to make Mario 64, which had the look and feel of our Yoshi game - but with the Mario character, of course - and beat Croc to market by around a year," San says. "Miyamoto-san came up to me at a show afterwards and apologised for not doing the Yoshi game with us and thanked us for the idea to do a 3D platform game. He also said that we would make enough royalties from our existing deal to make up for it. That felt hollow to me, as I'm of the opinion that Nintendo ended our agreement without fully realising it.
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Obviously, some of the more accusatory statements are to take with a pinch of salt, and I don't quite buy the "They didn't want us to use their characters" theory considering the number of shitty educational games released at the time. but it's still interesting to know. Do you think the franchise would be different today had Yoshi made the jump to 3D this early?
 
Re: Argonaut pitched a 3D Yoshi platformer

This is really interesting. Considering Super Mario 64 changed the entire industry, I'm sure this game would have reshaped not only the franchise, but the industry.
 
Re: Argonaut pitched a 3D Yoshi platformer

This is interesting indeed. Maybe Mario could have been different with Yoshi having a 3D platformer instead of Mario, who knows?
 
bumping this thread because there's been some info recently I found interesting.

On December 29, youtuber Guru Larry made a video named " 4 Times Shigeru Miyamoto Was an Asshole" and cited Jez San's gripe about Miyamoto "stealing" the concept of the 3D Yoshi game for SM64 during one of the segment. In a NeoGaf thread about the video, an employee Argonaut posted about the game, saying it was called "Yoshi Racing" (despite the Eurogamer article only descrbing it as a platformer) and disputing some of the claims Larry made in the video.

The Croc thing is interesting, but deceptive. Yoshi Racing was a pitch made for a 3d character racing game (this is after Stunt Race), probably around 95. The version I saw had Yoshi running and maybe jumping (it's been a while) along a canyon. This is the same time frame as the SF2 cancellation, which marks the end of Argonauts working relationship with Nintendo.
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It also turned out that a Croc fansite last updated in 2005 also made the claim Argonauts wanted to make a Yoshi racing game (the writer claims to have visited Argonaut's office), obviously wayyyyy before the Eurogamer article was published. This seems like this would've been Mario's version of Sonic R/Rayman Arena/Mad Dash Racing.
 
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