Super Famicom: July-Sept. 1990


Super Mario World, Big Run, and SD Great Battle previews

These games were demonstrated at Nintendo's Shoshinkai show (more pics from the show here!). Many of the images below for SMB4 may have been recycled from Nintendo's SFC demonstration over a year before, but anyway, here are some more higher-quality pics from this alpha version. Big Run was seen at Shoshinkai in a very early form, with a plain blue instrument panel and absolutely no on-screen obstacles. A 3-day tech demo, in other words. Needless to say, next to F-Zero this game quickly paled in comparison.
SD The Great Battle is a bit different from the released version. We can see the life meter and text boxes have changed, and there is some debug location text on each screen here.
 

Jelly Bean / Jerry Boy

Here's an early version of that great game, Jerry Boy, as shown in September & October, 1990. The graphics at this time were more realistic, less cutesy. They later got changed in 1991 to reflect a far more hand-drawn/cel-animated art style. Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori hinted in an interview that because the early graphics (drawn by Epic/Sony artists probably) didn't match their designs and cel-based art style very well, they took over the pixel art themselves, resulting in the style of the game we see today.

Click inside the images to see close-ups!

The explanatory text doesn't say much, other than that the game is only completed up to the end of the 1st stage, pictured above. Likewise, the graphics and characters may [and did!] change before the final release. This article mentions that the game is designed by Satoshi Tojiri, a fellow magazine writer and eventual Pokemon creator.

Even more and more pictures of the earliest Jelly Bean:

A lot of those pictures are duplicated between magazines, meaning they are probably still images that Epic showed off to the press (and not a real game demo, I bet. Oh, well.)

More pictures, this time from the kinder, gentler Jerry Boy version:

Some comparison shots:

Alpha
Beta
Final


I really like the blue vases in this early shot of ChouMakaiMura. Too bad they were taken out. (And the red clouds (?) in the background look good too.)


Here's R-Type II on the Super Famicom, before it became Super R-Type. This is still the first level, and it still has those 3 elevator things from the arcade game. They were quite different in Super R-Type.


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