Old School Gamer shares five awesome What-Ifs that will make you think differently about your favorite retro game experiences.
What if Ric Flair Was a Playable Character in WCW/nWo Revenge?: The best-selling wrestling game on the Nintendo 64 (Yes, more than Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy) is amazing but doesn’t have Ric Flair, arguably the greatest performer in the history of the company, in it. Due to disputes among Flair and WCW’s lawyers, The Nature Boy, who was prominently featured in the WCW game before Revenge, WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, was kept out of AKI and THQ’s final Nintendo 64 game. If he would have indeed got in, it would have been a blast to recreate the feud between The Four Horsemen and the nWo that took place during the tail end of 1998 and most of 99.
If Argonaut Software Made That Yoshi Game They Always Wanted To: Just in case you don’t know, the PS1 classic Croc was originally supposed to be a Yoshi-themed game. Argonaut, who designed the FX chip used in some the best games at the end of the SNES lifespan, pitched it to Nintendo, who turned them down (and stopped working with the developers altogether) and then got hard to work on Mario 64- some might even say that pitch from Argonaut was a wakeup call that things were changing. If Nintendo and Argonaut did indeed stay together, chances are Star Fox 2 would have been released and Yoshi might get a lot more love than he does today.
If There Were Other Mutant League Games on the Genesis After Hockey: After Mutant League Hockey, EA killed the brand, but did you know there were a Basketball, Racing and sequel to the Football game in the works? If those would have happened, perhaps EA would be looked at a bit differently and there wouldn’t be the awesome Mutant Football League game.
If NHL 96 Came out on PlayStation: Cancelled because it wasn’t up to the EA standard, the absence of an EA NHL game on the PlayStation allowed Sony’s NHL FaceOff series a full-year of dominance and in turn, five years of war across two consoles. If EA did indeed take the plunge in 96, who knows what could have happened. Chances are however, FaceOff would have wiped the floors with it.
If E.T. had more than Five Weeks of Development Time: It’s the worst game of all-time. It killed the industry and Atari. Are you done? You’re wrong. For five weeks, the game is a masterpiece. Why? Atari games took nine months to a year to develop back then. Could you imagine what the game could have been if it had more time? You know- and had proper collision detection, so you didn’t fall into pits constantly. Oh, and an instruction manual so you knew what was going on? It would have sold even more copies (than the 1.6 million it did ship) and guess what? Atari would have still crashed. But you’d have one less urban legend to tell, one less scapegoat in Howard Scott Warshaw.
Patrick Hickey, Jr., is the founder and editor-in-chief of ReviewFix.com and a lecturer of English and journalism at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn, New York. Over the past decade, his video game coverage has been featured in national ad campaigns by top publishers the likes of Nintendo, Deep Silver, Disney and EA Sports. His book series, "The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult and Classic Game Developers," from McFarland and Company, has earned praise from Forbes, Huffington Post, The New York Daily News and MSG Networks. He is also a former editor at NBC and National Video Games Writer at the late-Examiner.com
