Retro Cancelled SNES Game 'Cooly Skunk' Could Finally Be Getting A Cartridge Release

[admin]

​

Ukiyotei's cancelled SNES platformer Cooly Skunk could finally be on the verge of getting a cartridge release 29 years after it was originally meant to launch, thanks to a new crowdfunding campaign set to go live this weekend.

The story of Cooly Skunk is a pretty long and complex one, so we'll do our best to cut things down to the essentials to save you some time.

Cooly Skunk originally began life as an entirely different Super Famicom platformer (believed to be Metamoru Kid Gūmin) developed under the publisher Bullet Proof Software, and was pretty close to being finished before progress was eventually halted and moved over to another publisher named Visit. It was under Visit that the game underwent a reboot of sorts to feature on a Skunk-type character, with this change apparently coming about (according to its director Kenshi Naruse) to try to make the game more appealing to North American audiences.

​

With this new makeover in place, the game was pretty much completed and looked to be set for release for the Super Famicom/SNES, but then, all of a sudden, the 16-bit market collapsed in North America and Sony's PlayStation emerged. As a result, development shifted over to the more modern platform, with the game eventually being released on PlayStation in Japan in 1996 and North America in 1998 under a slightly edgier title "Punky Skunk".

​

Decades passed and the SNES original was presumed lost, but then in 2019, a BS-X 8Mbit cartridge for the Satellaview was discovered in a Super Potato in Akihabara labelled "Cooly Skunk" and secured by the user billscat-socks. This confirmed reports online that a demo of the SNES game had once been broadcast via Nintendo's Japanese-exclusive satellite service, prior to its cancellation.

Though the demo only featured three worlds, as outlined in a writeup by Gaming Alexandria, a hacker named MasterF0x was able to access the full game, revealing it to be a simpler version of the PlayStation release.

​

The campaign is being spearheaded by the video game YouTuber/researcher 4Studio. It will cost ¥6000 and is expected to ship in March 2025. We'll let you know once the Kickstarter goes live.