25 years earlier, Nintendo started to advertise an action-adventure game called Riqa, yet that game swiftly went away from the general public eye and disappeared right into obscurity. But currently, the game is back and usable many thanks to among the initial devs at the obsolete UK programmer Bits Studios.
As much as I can inform, Riqa was initial revealed in the May 1999 concern of Nintendo Power and advertised along with the scary standard Eternal Darkness, which was after that likewise set up to be an N64 launch. “Another gorgeous new adventure from Nintendo will be unveiled at E3 for the N64,” the publication composed. “Riqa, a third-person, sci-fi adventure featuring action and puzzle elements, has been in the works at Bits Studios for quite some time. Riqa (the name of the female agent star) should be ready for release near the beginning of the new century.”
Whatever excitement Nintendo appropriate had for Riqa, the publication swiftly wearied. The game was not discussed in the adhering to concern’s E3 wrap-up, and the only recommendation of it for months to find remained in a checklist of upcoming game titles. That’s an uncommon destiny for a game Nintendo had actually intended to release straight.
Riqa was silently terminated, and its short minute under an extremely dark limelight is hardly kept in mind. But currently, as Time Extension records, among the initial designers behind Riqa has actually released numerous models of the game online, and they’re totally usable on both emulators and real N64 equipment many thanks to gadgets likeEverdrives
That programmer passes the name Ten Shu, that operated at Bits Studios from 1997 to 2001. Ten Shu has really been publishing video clips of model Riqa develops for many years onYouTube Recently, the ROMs of those builds were released to a shut Facebook team, and a preservationist that passes LuigiBlood has actually currently brought those ROMs to Archive.org, total with a pest repair for a problem that stopped among the builds from running.
For the majority of you, video clips like the one above will certainly suffice to sate your interest regarding Riqa – this is still a model game, so it’s not mosting likely to match the gloss of also a 25-year-old retail launch. But it’s an interesting little item of background, particularly provided the protagonist’s similarity to Lara Croft and the game’s obvious similarity to a much more action-focused, sci-fi Tomb Raider.
At the moment, Tomb Raider was extremely preferred and the core games were mainly related to PlayStation and computer, so it’s little marvel if Nintendo wanted something with a minimum of shallow resemblances. Ten Shu keeps in mind that a number of Bits Studio’s terminated N64 jobs wound up being subsumed by the firm’s PS2-era games a couple of years later on, and little bits of Riqa could have resided on in a Kemco- released title called Rogue Ops – a stealth-action game that released to sub-par evaluations in 2003.
