If you were alive in the early '90s, you may have heard of The Incredible Crash Dummies. This was a series of action figures from Tyco — initially based on a set of public safety commercials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US — which were marketed primarily on their ability to spring apart whenever you pressed specific impact zones positioned on their bodies.
The line was surprisingly popular with children and eventually generated an unlikely media franchise that spanned a half-hour animated television special and a bunch of video games from the New York publisher Acclaim for various machines. This included a sidescrolling platformer by the Canadian developer Gray Matter Inc. for the Super Nintendo, Sega Mega Drive, and Commodore Amiga.
In the past, we were vaguely aware of the existence of these games from coming across them in old video game magazines, but something we didn't actually know about them, until today, is that prior to Gray Matter's game for the SNES, another studio called Software Creations (the developer of the NES and Game Boy games based on the license) took a swing at making a different version for Nintendo's 16-bit hardware.
This information comes courtesy of Kevin Edwards, a former programmer at Software Creations, who recently showed off the prototype of the earlier unreleased version of the game, on Twitter, after managing to get it up and running again.
According to Edwards, this version of the game started development in late 1991 and never entered full production, with the programmer working on it for only 1-2 months before it was eventually cancelled and work was moved over to Gray Matter.
While the game is clearly far from finished, as you can probably tell from the footage shown, what we found particularly interesting about it is the isometric perspective, which is similar to other Software Creations' titles like Solstice and Equinox and vastly different from the other versions that were released.
You can check out the footage in the tweet above.