Like the cavernous warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, video game history is littered with forgotten relics. Akira for the Super Nintendo; Resident Evil 1.5 for the PlayStation; the recently departed Silent Hills. Intrepid, tech-savvy fans have resurrected a number of these abandoned projects, although the potential conjured by the words "SNES Akira game" tends to fall well short of the reality.This is the case with Die Hard 64, an unreleased Nintendo 64 game that appears to be a preliminary version of the GameCube's Die Hard Vendetta (2002). Developer Bits Studios was split into two teams, according to a Retro Collect interview with former Bits employee and current Assembler Games forumer 10ahu. One of those teams was developing Die Hard 64.The footage above comes from 10ahu's ROMs, which, before you ask, aren't public. It's a little unfair to judge an incomplete game like this (though the eventual Die Hard Vendetta is no classic either), but hell: it sure looks rough! Skip to 2:20 for an amazingly fiddly gunfight that makes Goldeneye 007 look like Counter-Strike.Playing Die Hard 64 would likely be a nightmare. It's best like this, as an idealized dream; we can look at these messy prototypes and wonder at what might have been, given a little more time, a little more money. As Stephen King cautions in Pet Sematary, "Sometimes dead is better."
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