In the year 2000, Karma Studios was working on a promising Game Boy Color platformer called Stip that was sadly cancelled before it could get a proper release.
It's a project that we've personally never heard of before, but one that recently came to our attention thanks to some tweets from a former Karma Studios employee named Henk Nieborg.
On Twitter, Nieborg shared a collage of 160x144px screen mockups for the title, which demonstrate some of the gorgeous pixel art that was being developed for the game. These mockups show a password system; forest, ice, and factory levels, as well as what looks like a world map. As one Twitter user noted, it all has a lovely Amiga-vibe to it, thanks to the colour palette and use of dithering.
After a quick look online, we were able to find a super low-quality (144p, yikes!) video published 15 years ago that gave us a better idea of how it played. The video appears to show the player having to clear the screen of other characters to complete each stage. There were also boss stages too, featuring a wasp enemy and a warrior in a grass skirt.
The composer Faried Verheul's music from the game is also available online in a YouTube playlist, thanks to YouTuber DevEd8VGM, giving us a better idea of how the chiptune soundtrack would have sounded.
As Neiborg states, the reason it never came out is likely that it was never in a polished enough state to be a commercial release. Another comment under his post from a user named janjavier seems to indicate that the game was only 65% done at the time of cancellation and that the game's programmer doesn't want to publicly release the ROM due to its unfinished state.