One of the developers of the unreleased N64 game Riqa has recently published a bunch of prototype builds online in the closed Facebook group N64 Supergroup (as spotted by the preservationist LuigiBlood).
Riqa, in case you've never heard of it before, was a third-person action shooter that was in development at the UK company Bits Studios (who were also behind the cancelled Die Hard 64), with Nintendo publishing. It was originally shown off at the E3 expo in 1999, and has been described in the past as the N64's answer to "Tomb Raider" and "Perfect Dark’s biggest rival".
Sadly, though, the game was never released, with the studio cancelling the project following several delays, in order to focus the team's attention on two of the other games that were being worked on internally.
Over the years new footage from various prototypes has appeared online, courtesy of a developer nicknamed Ten Shu, but it seems they have been reluctant in the past to dump the ROMs, as the original team had voted against publicly sharing these builds. Now, however, it appears that someone must have had a change of heart, as the developer has now posted the four final builds of the game online and even published a tutorial on their YouTube channel to show people how to run the various prototypes in Project64 3.0.1.
Here's what Ten Shu wrote about the release:
"Hi,
From 97 to 2001 I worked at a company called Bits Studio.
This company made a lot of unrelease N64 games. (most of those game will end up becoming gamecube/ps2 games few years later)
Few years ago I ve released the unfinished DieHard64 Roms
I think its time people got a test of the Riqa another unreleased game for the n64.
I ve uploaded the 4 last build in a zip files you can all download and try.
The game work in some emulator. it also work on a N64 with an everdrive. I have lot more build of the game but i figured those 4 are probably the most interesting.One important thing. you need to have 2 controller to play the game. controller 2 is used to open the menu and select a level.
The 4 build in the rar files are the last build made of the game for the n64 before it get cancelled and the team reassigned to Diehard and Thieveworld(RogueOps).
There not much of a completed game here, but there level you can visit, sometime enemies you can kill and button you can press, cut scene and stuff like that. each build as different stage you can explore.
enjoy
Tenshu."
If you don't have access to the N64 Supergroup, LuigiBlood has created a mirror of these prototypes for ease of access and has even fixed one of the ROMs that wasn't working. As a result, you can grab them now from archive.org.