The road to a finished product is long, and inspiration can often come from the weirdest places. But if you follow that muse, you’ll often come up with something amazing. And even if you run out of gas, you’ll always have people wondering what could have been.
For this edition Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at two games that tapped into those odd ideas, and one television adaptation that sadly stayed on the drawing board.
You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.
Thanks to the heyday of the PS2 (and the late-season launch of the Wii), 2006 was a banner year for game adaptations of kid-friendly franchises. Disney/Pixar dropped the checkered flag on the first film in the Cars franchise. George Miller used some of his time away from Mad Max to get Happy Feet with a dancing penguin named Mumble. And Wilbur, who is definitely some pig, parkoured his way through a barn in a tie-in game for Charlotte’s Web.
Wait, what?
It’s true. According to developer Mike Mika, his team at Backbone Entertainment was inspired by the acrobatic traversal mechanics of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia franchise when creating a game based on the movie adaptation of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. The Game Boy Advance platformer was even known internally as “Pig of Persia”:
Laughing as I remember our Charlotte's Web GBA game we did at Backbone. It was an action platform game that had Wilbur leaping around on platforms. It had an awesome project name internally: Pig of Persia, in honor of Prince of Persia, the game it was absurdly based on. pic.twitter.com/3POeF3VlRe
— Mike Mika (@MikeJMika) April 24, 2019
Plants Vs Zombies is another game whose concept sounds completely ridiculous when you try to explain it out loud. The player controls a group of mutant plants (who are… of course… armed to the teeth) and they must place them in strategic spots on the lawn to stop the approaching zombie horde.
Ridiculous or not, PvZ’s over-the-top presentation is one of the major drivers behind its appeal, and over the years the game has grown into a proven franchise with a sequel, multiple spinoffs, and a constant stream of comic adaptations.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of how it all started, designer George Fan recently shared some early pre-production notes from Plants Vs Zombies, including an early glimpse at the five-lane playfield:
Happy 10th Birthday, Plants vs. Zombies! I had no idea when scribbling this on paper over 10 years ago just how much it'd change my life! pic.twitter.com/MyZMx9m7Zh
— George Fan (@thegeorgefan) May 5, 2019
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show was an instant hit with kids when it debuted in September 1989. It wasn’t a very close match to the games, but the wacky adventures of Mario, Luigi, the Princess, and Toad (and the even wackier live-action adventures of “Captain” Lou Albano and Danny Wells) struck a chord with the intended audience.
When Albano and Wells weren’t encouraging viewers to “Do the Mario,” DIC Animation filled the gap with a Legend of Zelda cartoon every Friday that also strayed pretty far from the games. But it turns out that Link’s quest to protect Hyrule wasn’t the only companion show that DIC had in development.
A handful of artwork samples from a proposed Super Mario Bros. Power Hour show were recently spotted on eBay by Tanooki Joe. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show would have taken the first slot, but the second half hour would have been filled by an adaptation of California Games, Castlevania, Double Dragon, or Metroid:
Holy shit. Someone just put up promo art for The Super Mario Bros Power Hour on eBay! These were concepts for other video game based cartoons to run alongside Super Mario Bros 3. None of these ever got past the concept phase. pic.twitter.com/eIFft21T3u
— Tanooki Joe (@TanookiKuribo) May 7, 2019
As you can see from the sample artwork, the producers were planning to take a few liberties with the source material. It’s unknown how closely DIC was working with Nintendo, but depicting intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran as a man probably means the artist was mostly on their own. Castlevania would have also thrown out its established hero, ditching Simon Belmont and replacing him with two kids in a modern-day setting. But on the other hand, the pitch for Double Dragon looks pretty faithful and California Games certainly would have involved games that take place in California.
That does it for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. Thanks to Mike Mika, George Fan, and Tanooki Joe for supplying these trivia tidbits, and be sure to follow me on Twitter to find more history lessons just like these in the future.