- Theme:
- Light
- Dark
 |
Nintendo 64
Freak Boy
Platform: N64
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Developer: Virgin Interactive
The Basics
 Click to enlarge |
Created by Virgin Interactive Entertainment's in-house development staff, Freak Boy could perhaps have best been described as a hallucinogenic-inspired take on Super Mario 64. The story went something like this: In a world far away (and rendered in much brighter colors than our own), the peaceful Hedrons were invaded by a group of malevolent outer-dimensional beings, known as The Zos. These bad seeds cut a hole through the center of their sun and abducted each and every Hedron. Save one, that is. Your character - a simple polygonal Everyman - managed to avoid capture. But he didn't lay low. Instead, he mutated into the bizarre being known as Freak Boy and went on a quest to wipe out all of The Zos and rescue his folks. Starting at the world farthest away from the sun, he would have traveled from planet to planet, through the interdimensional gate in the sun's center and into his enemies' realm. Each stage of the game's five levels would have beenbroken up into four different worlds, for 20 completely garishly-hued, texture-mapped worlds in all.
 Click to enlarge |
Just like in the comic books, mutation wouldn't necessarily have lead to debilitating physical deformity. Instead, it would have provided superpowers…. Freak Boy was a large blocky creature whose head, chest, and feet floated independently of one another. These open spaces would have left room for the Freak to place various items into his body, thus gaining special abilities. Interestingly enough, where an object was placed would have altered its function. For example, a gun placed into his head slot may have been used to shoot enemies above him; fitting the same weapon into his chest might have caused him to shoot forward; placing the gun in his legs would have found him shooting below. You could have either popped the tools out of his body to make room for new ones or had them knocked out by foes. Once these items were all gone though, Freak Boy would have been vulnerable to attack and easily killed by his enemies if hit. Luckily, however, he would have essentially had four lives (one for each part of his body). To say the least, Freak Boy's appearance was altered dramatically throughout the course of the game. This unique gameplay mechanic easily explained the game's original name, "Stacker," which gave new meaning to the phrase, "working title."
 Click to enlarge |
In what would have been Virgin Interactive Entertainment's first game for the Nintendo 64 console system, Freak Boy appeared to have some of the best attributes of the unit's signature title (notably Super Mario 64's cinematic-style perspectives and sheer size), while still retaining quite a bit of originality of its own.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Although not a RIP written in stone, the game has been on a seemingly permanent hold. GameSpot spoke with Mark Skaggs, Virgin Interactive's executive producer of internal development back in February about the title. Here's what he had to say:
 Click to enlarge |
"The official status is that it's on 'active hold' because when I say just 'hold,' people think, 'Oh, my god. That means it's been canceled.' But one of the things I had to make a decision on in the fall was what we actually were going to do with this project, because you know it's been going on for, like, three years or so. So in the process of making some changes here, I decided to not waste the concept or game by implementing it poorly or killing it by trying to push something through that just wasn't effective for us at that point.
"So at that point, we kept it sort of alive and it was one of the things I had hoped to start up again later this year. But when [an online] article came out [in early February] saying that it had been canceled, that kind of raised a whole new set of issues with the design firm that had originally come up with the idea a few years back. So now we're in the process of figuring out those issues."
We then asked if the game would revert back to those original ideas. "Yeah, it might," said Skaggs. "We're figuring that out. It's one of those cases that whoever leaked that status to the press really kind of did a disservice to everyone, including the players, because now it had taken something that was a great concept - one of my all-time favorites - and raised sort of a cloud around it, that we have to fix."
As of this writing, the cloud has not been fixed. Virgin Interactive has also been purchased by EA, and it's unclear where the project currently lies.
| « Previous Page | Next: Show me more » |
