A recent leak of unreleased Nintendo prototypes has revealed a wealth of curiosities, including an unreleased port of an arcade hockey game from the early '90s. Unlike many of the other unfinished prototypes in the leak though, the adaptation of Taito's Hit the Ice was not only completed, but enhanced.
The cache of Nintendo prototypes was leaked last Friday, and includes early builds of Yoshi's Island and Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. Taito's unreleased NES port is of particular interest though, because it was not only finished, but enhanced with RPG-like features not seen in the original arcade game. Players were free to wander around town, speaking with NPCs in a quest mode.
In many ways, these features were ahead of their time, but Hit the Ice ironically went unpublished because it was late to its own party. The game finished development in 1993, well after the original Nintendo Entertainment System had bowed out of the market in favor of the SNES. With inferior-looking graphics and dated core mechanics, the cost of production and promotion likely would have exceeded any returns from a release. Like many old features that were ahead of their time, similar mechanics have since resurfaced in other games.
The prototype leak was also almost immediately followed by another leak that released source codes for classic Nintendo 64 titles. It is interesting to get a peek into Nintendo's private archives of unpublished games, and with so much data to sift through between both leaks, it is likely that there are more surprises that have yet to be revealed.