What is it with British-developed Super NES games being lost to time? Last month, Nintendo finally published Argonaut's Star Fox 2 more than 20 years after the game was shelved in favor of… well, we're not sure why it was shelved, actually. Nintendo tucked it away for two decades and scavenged its design for parts to include in other Star Fox games, and it's only been now in 2017 that we've finally had a chance to experience the Super NES shooter sequel in all its FX-powered glory on the Super NES Classic Edition.
Now, likely taking a page from Nintendo's strategy, Analogue has announced that its upcoming Super Nt clone console will also include an unreleased 16-bit shooter from the UK… well, sort of. Unlike Star Fox 2, Factor 5's Super Turrican did in fact see the light of day. But never as intended. A blistering action game in the Contra mold, Super Turrican only appeared in a compromised form necessitated by the costs and limitations of 16-bit cartridges. Factor 5 developed Super Turrican as a 6MB game, but one of the game's publishers — Seika, Tonkin House, or Hudson — forced the developer to trim away a third of the data in order to squeeze the release into a 4MB cart.
Factor 5 didn't simply throw that material away, though. While Super Turrican hit stores in a reduced form, the files for the original full version of the game have remained in the possession of Factor 5 studio boss Julian Eggebrecht. It's this unexpurgated ROM — Super Turrican: Director's Cut — that Analogue intends to include on the Super Nt. Analogue claims a third of the planned game was trimmed, meaning Director's Cut will be 50% larger than the existing Super Turrican.
Analogue will also be included a replica box for collectors to put on their shelves, though no cartridge will be included. (While the company has expressed interest in producing Director's Cut carts, no plan to do so is presently exists.) Even so, it's hard to complain about this new trend of lost Super NES games resurfacing decades later… though, ideally, future games won't require people to buy hardware to enjoy them. A person only has so much room for clone hardware.