Parody World: Monster Party (found Famicom prototype of "Monster Party" NES game; 1989)

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Monster Party (Proto)-Title screen.png

Title screen.

Status: Found

Date found: 03 Jul 2014

Found by: Beaglepuss

Monster Party is an NES action-platformer game which follows a kid named Mark in an alternate world, populated with monsters and supernatural creatures, many of them being based on figures in popular culture, horror icons or Japanese ghost mythology.

Differences Between the Prototype and Final Game

Due to copyright issues, many of the bosses had to be changed, and a majority of the blood was removed to coincide with Nintendo of America's censorship policies. In a gaming magazine from the time, two preview screenshots of the game were different from the final release:[1]

  • One showed the title screen being covered with red blood instead of green slime in the released game, and the selected cursor being a skull instead of a pumpkin; the spider on the left side of the screen also looked more like a humanoid face on legs.
  • The other shows the Man-Eating Plant boss being different than in the final product: its head is more rounded, looking more like a Piranha Plant/Audrey II, and there is a stilted microphone and a speaker around it. In the released game, the player character can stand on the area where the speaker originally was, despite the background being empty.

According to other sources, two of the bosses had to have their sprites changed because they were too similar to licensed characters: a boss looking like a Mogwai in a box from Gremlins has been changed into a cat, and an Ape from Planet of the Apes has been changed into a Pumpkin-headed ghost.

As seen in the recently released Famicom version, which is the original NES prototype shown in the magazine, almost every boss was a movie reference or had a different design. A boss based on Damajin, a Japanese movie monster and a different Medusa boss were among the changed features before the final release of the game.

In the leaked release, it is noticeable that the music which plays after the first level transitions into its gorier form in the NES release is missing from the Famicom release; even earlier versions of the game didn't have the transition at all, and different background tiles of more detailed mountains.

Finding of the Prototype

On April 24th, 2014, a Nintendo Age forum user named Beaglepuss made a post claiming to have a prototype of the original game and promised to dump the game "within a year".[2]

On July 3rd, 2014, Beaglepuss followed up on his promises and dumped the prototype to the public.[3]

Gallery

Footage of the prototype, as originally only posted on Nico Nico Douga.

References