Concept art revealing the existence of cancelled spin-off games based on The Legend of Zelda’s Sheik and Mario’s Boo was recently discovered, but their artist says very few people at Nintendo would ever have seen them before the games were canned.
Speaking to IGN, ex-Retro Studios concept artist Sammy Hall explained that both games were in pre-production when cancelled, and “I doubt many at Nintendo proper saw much of any of this stuff. I was mostly put into a room like Milton from Office Space and tasked to brainstorm between other projects.”
Created while at Metroid Prime creator Retro Studios, images of both games were posted to Hall’s ArtStation account over the course of the last two years – they have since been removed.
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One set of galleries showed a game set around a male version of Sheik, the character most associated with Zelda’s disguise in Ocarina of Time. It would have been an action-JRPG, set after the dark timeline of Ocarina of Time, in which the last male Sheikah travels across a ruined Hyrule while a Dark Gerudo tribe gives birth to a new form of Ganon. It would apparently have acted as an origin story for the Master Sword.
The other is a game based around playing as a Boo from the Mario series, possibly titled Haunt, and seemingly designed for a handheld consoles. It may have been set around a Boo learning to scare.
According to Hall, the ideas for both games came from ex-Retro leads Mark Pacini, Todd Keller and Kynan Pearson, but were “cancelled the week they went to create their other studios.” It seems likely that, following the huge admiration for Metroid Prime – itself a spin-off from a beloved Nintendo franchise – that Retro either decided, or was asked to explore other new ideas within established series.
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Retro’s finished work never returned to the Mario or Zelda franchises (aside from co-developing Mario Kart 7), with the company making the newer Donkey Kong platformers, and now engaged in making Metroid Prime 4 – a return to the groundbreaking series it created. Hall no longer works in the game industry.
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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com Concept Artist Discusses Those Cancelled Zelda and Mario Spin-Offs