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We were recently lucky enough to sit down and speak with former Rare artist Kev Bayliss regarding his work on the NES title A Nightmare on Elm Street.
During the chat, Bayliss spoke a little about the many unreleased games he worked on during his time with the British studio, and, given that some are not documented online, I felt it vital to preserve this information.
It came up towards the end of our discussion, which took place at the Nottingham Video Game Expo, with Bayliss reflecting on how long it had been since he'd worked on Nintendo's 8-bit hardware.
Below is the verbatim Q&A. Enjoy!
Kevin Bayliss: So yeah, it was that grey area, that's so long ago when I worked on 'the grey console', when I worked on so many different games, some of them canned, some of them not.
Time Extension: Have you ever written down all of the canned or unreleased games?
Kevin Baylis: This is a list I've never written. I sometimes feel a bit cautious about mentioning them in case somebody's going to pop up and say, you're giving away NDA stuff! <laughs> I could probably write down about 10. But there's a lot of them. I'm sure there's some ROMs floating around. I imagine Tim's got a lot of ROMs at his house.
Time Extension: Are there any unreleased games you worked on that you're especially sad didn't come out?
Kevin Bayliss: Yeah, I think there was a game... I'm actually 55 this year, in about a month. Funny enough, the one game that I worked on was called 55, and that was canned. It was too late in development, because the Super Nintendo was coming out.
It was a racing game, similar to R.C. Pro-Am. But it didn't have any bends. Everything was a 90-degree corner. And it was based in 1955 and you had little hot rods. And I digitised all these little cars and put them all in. And you could trade and race. So if you raced somebody, if you beat them, you got their car. So it was like, you know, you were racing for pink tickets or pink slips, or whatever they were called. So yeah, that was one game that I wish it had come out. Probably wouldn't have done very well.
Time Extension: It's always sad when a game doesn't come out, because it's a group of people who have invested months, maybe years of their life into it.
Kevin Bayliss: But we were paid to do that work, you know. International Gymnastics was another one I worked on for a long time. Valley of the Kings was awesome, and that didn't come out. Because it needed extra work and it never got done. But you're always racing against that clock. How long is it going to take to put it into production, get released, and then Nintendo announce that there's a new console coming out? Then, do they continue putting investment into the pre-existing game, or should they be telling people about the new console?
So this is why games like Dino Planet were ported and they moved to the next generation. Same happened at Playtonic with the Wii U and the Switch, we had to support the system that we thought everybody was going to buy. And also from a technological point of view, we're a small team and we just couldn't get it to run right on the Wii U. But yeah, lots more games that were canned as well. I'll drip feed those over the years. <laughs>
Time Extension: Please make a note of them in a personal diary. Because if they were previewed in a magazine, people will know to ask about them. But there are so many unreleased games that were never announced, meaning nobody knows to ask.
Kevin Bayliss: I should draw a little artist's impression of what they look like. Because I can remember probably pixel for pixel some of the sprites I did.