Among the old things I found recently in my mom's house there's an EPROM from the old days at New Frontier, when we started working with the Game Boy console. It turned out to be a prototype of Pinocchio, a 3D isometric game that never got released as seen in the video. There's already a dump of this game floating around, but this seems to be an earlier version as it still doesn't show the copyright screen.
Actually we started working on the game some time before 1992 (IIRC) as an internal project named Infrey Quest, and it would be the first 3D isometric game ever made for the Game Boy. This kind of game was well known in 8 bit computers (Ant Attack, Knight Lore, Alien 8, Batman, Head Over Heels...), but it was hard to achieve in the little console and never done before.
We tried selling the game to Infogrames, for which we had been working some years since the 8 bit computer days, but unfortunately they weren't interested in releasing the game without a license. I remember the game first being named after "El Zorro" (for which I composed a pair of tracks), but later it was changed to 'The Adventures of Pinocchio' and completely adapted to the character with all new music and graphics. Nevertheless, the game remained unreleased even after all the changes.
Years later, now as Bit Managers, we took up the original Infrey Quest game and improved the engine, graphics and sound (through most of the music remained the same), but again Infogrames didn't want to publish the game without a known license. Finally we sold it to a German company named Laguna Entertainment after changing the title and graphics (again) to 'Otto's Ottifanten - Baby Bruno's Nightmare'.
In the meanwhile Laguna Entertainment was being bought by Infogrames, which in turn released the game as Infogrames Deustchland. We could have saved a few years here!
Credits for Pinocchio:
Program & Design: Isidro Gilabert.
Graphics & Design: Rubén Gómez.
Music: Yours truly.
You can listen to the whole soundtrack here:
soundcloud.com/joemcalby/ottifanten
And there's a nice selection of screens from the final game here:
gamefaqs.com/gameboy/997271-ottos-ottifanten-baby-brunos-alptraum/images
I could have used a newer Game Boy model to show the prototype, but I thought it would be cool to play it on the same console I used to compose its soundtrack. I can't believe I played so many games on that blurry screen!
