Jet Force Gemini may not be quite as popular as other Rare classic N64 titles like Banjo Kazooie or GoldenEye 007, but that hasn't stopped it from developing something of a cult following online among those who have grown to love the sci-fi adventure about a group of intergalactic agents.
Over the years, we've encountered hundreds of articles and videos attempting to piece together the history of the game and unravel its deepest, darkest secrets, with perhaps the most compelling mystery that has emerged in all that time being the existence of an unreleased Game Boy Color port, which was in development at Bits Studios in the early 2000s.
Very little is known about this port, so we recently set out to identify its development team and see if we could uncover anything more about how the mysterious project came to be and why it was eventually cancelled.
Just to give you some background, the existence of the port came to light in 2009, after a collector on the Assembler Forums, stated they had come into possession of a cart. This collector shared several screenshots from the game but ultimately said they had decided against dumping the ROM, suggesting they would instead try to sell it.
From there, nothing else of note really happened until January 2016, which is when a video was uploaded to YouTube under the account name "Game Boy Color" reportedly showing the ROM in action. This was then followed one year later by another video, as well as various uploads by someone named DevEd8 VGM who had compiled the entire game's soundtrack by composer Jeroen Tel into a playlist on the video-sharing platform.
As Jet Force Gemini for the Game Boy Color was never commercially released, it was a little difficult to know where to start our investigation, so we ended up contacting pretty much anyone we could find who worked at Bits Studios in the early 2000s on games for the Nintendo handheld, and, as luck would have it, we eventually got a hit.
Dylan Beale, a producer on the project, responded, offering to help us get in touch with the lead coder Jas Austin and lead artist Mark Jones, and even more excitedly, implying that Austin might potentially still have a ROM of the game in their possession. So we thanked him for his help and waited to hear back, in the meantime fielding more replies to our messages from other members of the team we had reached out to, including the artist Laurence McDonald, background artist Martin Wheeler, and the cutscene programmer Steve Clark — all of whom struggled to remember the precise details of why Rare and Bits ended up working together or why the project never ended up shipping but offered to help us if they could.
Eventually, we heard back from Austin, who told us the videos looked authentic and gave us more information about the project, but sadly denied having a copy. He suggested that we should probably get in touch with Rare/Microsoft as "they are the current IP holders", but as Rare failed to mention at all during its video game compilation Rare Replay we're going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are few people left at the company who remember its existence, and even less chance any of them would share a ROM.
We did, however, try to contact some former Rare employees, with Gary Richards, the former handheld lead at the company, managing to provide an explanation of why the game was outsourced, suggesting that it was "simply down to numbers" as Rare was busy "developing Perfect Dark, Conker, Banjo, Donkey Kong Country, and Mickey Adventure Racing" at the time.
With all that out of the way, it's probably worth visiting some of the details of the project that Austin shared with us.
According to the coder, the game was pretty much complete when it was cancelled and was in "the process of going through final testing". However, much like all of the other developers we had spoken to, he couldn't quite recall exactly why it was abandoned saying he was just as "surprised as everybody else" was, when the decision was made. One theory we've seen floated online is that the game was potentially cancelled due to the poor commercial performance of Perfect Dark (GBC) and Conker's Pocket Tales, but we haven't found anything concrete to suggest this, so it's probably worth taking this with a grain of salt.
As Austin told us, the majority of the design for the Game Boy Color title was "very much Bits-driven" as opposed to being forced upon the company by Rare, with the developer visiting the Twycross developer to present a "one-page overview" to communicate what it had planned for the project. There were apparently a few more meetings too, but overall, there would end up being very little input from Rare into the design or art, with Bits pretty much being left alone to work things out themselves over the 6-12 months the game was in development.
It was a completely different story. The story started as you crash land on a planet, with only Juno being playable. I seem to remember Vela was missing and Lupus was injured. As you played through you would unlock all three characters.
Interestingly, comparing the opening of the N64 game to the Game Boy Color prototype video online, it seemed like the two games featured slightly different openings, though they both seemingly began on the forest planet of Goldwood. Because of this, we asked Austin if he could remember anything about the story of the game and whether it was set to follow the same plot as the N64 title.
To this, he responded, "It was a completely different story. The story started as you crash land on a planet, with only Juno being playable. I seem to remember Vela was missing and Lupus was injured. As you played through you would unlock all three characters. In our game, they all had a unique skill that would allow only them to progress through parts of the levels. I remember that Lupus had jet-boots that would let him jump and float to traverse long gaps."
He continues, "We also had a central hub level where you would return to and that had warps that took you to other self-contained levels. I'm sure it was the classics: desert level, jungle level, lava level, etc."
Unfortunately, during our research, we weren't able to uncover any more materials from the project or find a definitive reason for its cancellation. But we promise to keep looking and encourage anyone with any information to email us via the contact form on our site.