An early version of the Nintendo fighting game Joy Mech Fight, from one year prior to its release, has been preserved online, giving players a chance to check out a version of the impressive Famicom title from back when it was being developed for the Famicom Disk System.
Initially released in 1993, Joy Mech Fight is a Nintendo-published fighting game that stood out at the time for being able to squeeze some fairly remarkable graphics and animations from the Nintendo Famicom for its roster of robot fighter.
This was achieved thanks to a clever technique that saw the game's developers dividing each robot fighter into multiple smaller floating sprites to be able to pull off a smoother and more realistic style of animation for its large-scale characters. This solved the issue of bigger character sprites traditionally being much slower and more awkward to animate.
At its core, the game featured a story campaign as well as one-on-one battles against friends and the computer, with the campaign seeing players take control of a comedy robot named Sukapon, who is tasked by his creator with defeating, reprogramming, and retrieving a set of military robots that have been stolen by the evil scientist Dr. Ivan Walnach. Credited today as a creation of Nintendo R&D1, it, in actuality, started life as a project of two programmers named Koichi Hayashida and Kouichirou Eto, who met at a series of game development seminars that Nintendo held in partnership with the advertising firm Dentsu in the early '90s to try and find the next generation of talented video game creators.
Together, the pair original developed the title under the name Battle Batttle League for the Nintendo Famicom Disk System in 1992, before joining the company, where they eventually renamed and reconfigured the project into a standard Famicom release the following year.
Arguably, because of the fact the game was released over a decade into the Nintendo Famicom's life cycle and was initially only ever published in Japan, it never really had a great chance to build an overseas audience back when it was first made available. However, those curious enough to check it out would eventually get a fan translation in the year 2000 from AlanMidas, which would later be followed by an official release in 2023 for the Nintendo Switch, as part of the Nintendo Classics range.
According to the social media announcement, the preservationist Armadylo is the person responsible for dumping the early prototype of the game on Hidden Palace, with this version including the main game on disk 1 and a character/move editor on the second disk. You can find out more here.