Many years ago, Retro Studios built a playable concept for a Gamecube game called Adept. The premise was very similar to that of Portal. It was a first-person game in which the player used a special weapon to create portals that allowed them to manipulate the space around them. Rather than use circular portals, Adept used cylinders that could be used for different things — pushing, pulling, teleporting, and so on. They also created a lot of interesting wrinkles for combat.
Retro began work on the prototype after completing Metroid Prime 3 in 2007. This was within the same timeframe in which Valve’s Portal had taken the world by storm, and everyone was attempting to think with portals.
Unfortunately, Nintendo didn’t get it and canned the project.
Footage of Adept had never made its way online until this week when the YouTube channel Did You Know Gaming uploaded a new video to on the many and varied Retro projects that never got off the ground.
The Adept prototype was created by Paul Tozour, who worked as a programmer on Metroid Prime 2 and 3. Tozour’s work was shown to Kensuke Tanabe, producer on the Metroid Prime series at Nintendo. Tanabe wasn’t interested in Adept and from Tozour’s perspective, this was the result of Tanabe’s lack of familiarity with Portal.
“Nintendo Japan is very insular, and there is very much a ‘not invented here’ syndrome,” Tozour told Did You Know Gaming. Tozour had tried to help Tanabe understand the design he was riffing on ahead of his pitch, and had offered the producer a copy of Portal to try. Tanabe had politely declined, insisting that accepting gifts was against Nintendo company policy.
The one bone Nintendo was prepared to throw Tozour: he could continue development on Adept if he moved it to the Nintendo DS. Tozour wasn’t convinced the game would work on the popular handheld, and chose to let the project go.
There are a stack of other Retro games that were either cancelled or abandoned contained in video. It’s always fun to wonder what might have been, and DYKG has done great work collating it all here.
Image: Nintendo
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