Game & Wario's original iteration

Glowsquid

Glowsquid

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It's somewhat well known that Game & Wario was originally meant to be a small number of generic tech demos pre-installed on the Wii U, but less known is that after deciding to make it a retail game, the development team wanted to make it an original license. This tidbit is revealed in the game's Iwata Asks:

Iwata
So you decided that the game should be a standalone release. But you didn't suddenly decide that it should be a WarioWare title, did you?


Abe No, we didn't. The WarioWare series has always had a very distinctive graphical style, and with the HD6 display supported by Wii U, we were rather at a loss as to how this would work with the series.

[...]

Mori
Kobayashi-san happened to catch sight of a quite distinctive image of a ship's captain, which one of our designers had come up with. He suggested that we take that image and make it like a paper-thin character that moves. From that point on, things became much more straightforward for us. We realized that our approach should be to make things as distinctive and interesting as possible, and so that's how we proceeded.

Abe
Yes, that's right.

Mori
It was at that stage that we came up with a story for the game.

Abe
That's right. We came up with a story and tried to make everything in the game fit together. But it was the first time we had ever tried to do something like that, so we were worried that it would be very time-consuming. We set ourselves a deadline of December of that year, and embarked on a process of trial and error. But in the end, we just couldn't come up with anything that felt right. We realized that if we continued in that fashion, it was going to take far too long. That's when we hit upon the idea that Wario and his pals had invented all of these games, and that was what tied them all together. We revised the structure of the game and spoke to Sakamoto-san about it.
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(incidentally, they talk about how they thought they had to give WarioWare "realistic" graphics because the Wii U is an HD console and it's kinda sad).

More interesting still is that they state the "Cluck-a-Pop" toy capsules take concepts from this scrapped iteration of the game:

Mori
At the same time, I did have some regrets. It was sad to abandon the story we had been working on before it was complete.

Abe
Ah, but we were able to include some of the ideas we came up with in the final game...

Mori
Yes, that's true. Some of those ideas survived.

Abe
There are all kinds of elements in the mix.

Iwata
You see, all your efforts weren't in vain! (laughs)

Mori
You're right. We certainly don't believe in wasting things! (laughs)

Abe
There are all sorts of fun bonus elements we've included in the game, which we collectively call the 'CHICK-N-WIN' content. When you see that extra content, you'll probably be surprised at how much care and attention has gone into a lot of them. That's where you'll find a lot of things left over from the initial stages of the project.

Iwata
The 'CHICK-N-WIN' content that creates a really distinct impression must have survived from some earlier incarnation of the game. (laughs)

Abe Yes, indeed. (laughs) We salvaged discarded ideas, gave them a good polish and included them as bonus content.
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As someone who loves reading about changed and scrapped stuff in media, this is very interesting to me. Based on the toy capsules of the final game, do you think it's possible to get an idea of what this original version of G&W was like? What was the premise, who were going to be the characters (if it was even a character-driven game), etc?
 
The characters, probably just some made up on the spot-characters or well designed characters for the game, but probably not memorable characters such as Ashley and Luigi. In my opinion I'm glad the way it turned out, it gave us more Ash-wee time.

Look, learn something new everyday. You like reading about things that'll never be, lol. WarioWare with realistic graphics could have been way past cool
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Just think how Ashley would have looked, probably cool as heck. Well, I don't mind the artstyle at all, but realistic graphics on Warioware sounds mind blowing.
 
Glowsquid said:
As someone who loves reading about changed and scrapped stuff in media, this is very interesting to me. Based on the toy capsules of the final game, do you think it's possible to get an idea of what this original version of G&W was like? What was the premise, who were going to be the characters (if it was even a character-driven game), etc?
Click to expand...
I've always wondered this myself. Based on the prizes, it's hard to tell what kind of story and character they'd have in mind. Also, typical Nintendo. Sometimes, they come close to making something entirely new, but it ends up falling back on an existing IP. (We've got Splatoon, but surely it can't be the only new IP they have at the moment. There's got to be more than that later on)

Remember the Shield Pose tech demo from E3 2011? I guess they were trying to make that pirate guy the villain or something.
 
Hm... now that I'm looking at all the souvenirs again... I'm not really seeing anything that could be turned into a full game...

Speaking of the souvenirs, I was honestly kinda disappointed by them if you compare them to the souvenirs of Twisted.
A huuuge part of them are just cards with advice and pictures which aren't that interesting, many of them are the microgames from Gamer so it basically doubles as the album...
The call cards are random... but most of them not very entertaining.
The voice changers aren't that good, the mirrors aren't very interesting...
The Warionettes are kinda funny, I'll give it that.
And I do very much like the style of the bugband members. But again, compared the the souvenirs from Twisted it's pretty crummy.
 
That... actually makes a lot of sense. Game and Wario was rushed and never meant to be a Wario game, which explains why the end result is so disappointing. I think the concept of various minigames tied by a single story is pretty damn interesting, and I'm really curious if they'll stash the idea to make it go somewhere later on; I'd love it if it did. I couldn't get far enough to see the chicken souvenirs and I don't plan to anytime soon, but it'd be cool to know more about this scrapped title! by the sounds of it they were really excited about it, which makes it more of a shame that it ended up being eh... yeah. Nobody won. :c
 
It feels weird saying this... but.... I think the best thing about the game..... is the token machine you unlock for getting every souvenir...

Maybe it's the greed in me talking but even though there's no point to getting more tokens it feels strangely satisfying. It's like you can finally use one of those things and actually win. :D
 
incidentally I really enjoyed G&W's standalone souvenirs. "Beans", Beauty Magazine and the Box of Surprise are hilarious.
 
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