tomb Raider It was one of the most important video game sagas at the end of the 90s of the last century. There was no console for which one of its versions had not arrived, although, curiously, the Nintendo of those years, she was completely orphaned by the adventures of Lara Croft. Other companies therefore rushed to fill this gap with a similar concept. Do you remember a case?
says a lot about Nintendo 64 that there will never be tomb Raiderin full turmoil of Lara Croft as a cultural icon of that era, but that’s how it was, so one could only hope for a similar adventure from another studio that dared to copy the formula and develop an alternative. And it happened, even though the project was ultimately rejected and we never got to test it…until now.
The Tomb Raider clone on Nintendo 64
The fact is that during those years a group called Studio Bits announced the development of a game called RIQA which was practically a clone of a tomb Raider of Lara Croft, by simply changing the theme and settings. Besides, he had every blessing imaginable and even his own. Nintendo would take care of its exclusive distribution, to give it even more importance.
This is something that the Japanese are used to doing quite frequently, looking at the development landscape of their gaming ecosystems and, the titles that they consider important, essential for each of their machines, adopt them to support a distribution that is much larger. more generous than a non-distributor can afford. First party.
RIQA, in any case, it never came out, although we were able to see it in motion at E3 in 1999 and its release date was already set for that same year. The economic problems of maintaining AAA production for the time surely put an end to all the hopes of those responsible who, faced with the expected delays, ended up canceling its launch and devoting themselves to other, more profitable things.
How to benefit from RIQa now
As is the case with many other games that were never released, for many systems, community preservation efforts make it possible to play these unfinished projects and see how they turned out. This is the case of RIQA, since we can download several built development from Archive.org and run them on PC (with good graphics) in emulators of Nintendo 64.
One of the developers of RiQa (unreleased N64 game), nicknamed Ten Shu, has posted the latest prototypes of the game dating from 2000 online.
I mirrored them for easier access since it was only in a Facebook group. I also fixed one of the ROMs that wasn’t working.
https://t.co/y1XFIqLpVy https://t.co/BnBu6pf0z9April 16, 2024 • 1:02 p.m.
Even if you have a Nintendo 64 with a Everdrive –or any other similar device–, you can load these ROMs and test on the hardware of the machine itself how it works. A way, really, of rediscovering the past and discovering little gems which we don’t understand why they never came out but which, at least, we have the opportunity, more than two decades later, to experience what they didn’t let us try.
We leave you below the download link of the game, in case you want to take a look at it on your computer or on the original console for which it was designed.
