Re-Volt

2000 DC Studios

Platform: Nintendo Game Boy Color

I lost many hours with Re-Volt back in 1999 – a fun title where you controlled various different radio-controlled cars around the likes of Supermarkets and Museums. Towards the end of 1999, DC Studios would get the go ahead to produce a Game Boy Color edition of the game for Acclaim Studios.

Of course, the Game Boy Color couldn’t replicate the 3D approach of the PC and N64 editions, so they took on a Micro Machines top-down viewpoint – so a sort of de-make if you like which was not uncommon at the time with the popularity of the hand-held.

The first milestone was set to be released by the end of November with the initial code, which was done by Quang Nguyen, with the final release due for April 2000. Initial work progressed well, though after a while there were various issues, such as car handling and speed – part of which was likely caused by the size of the maps.

According to the Re-Volt wiki page, the game had been planned to be squeezed on a 1MB cartridge, but space was running out very quickly for the rest of the game logic. In the end, the project would be cancelled by March 2000, where work it seems was underway on Milestone 4 at that point.

Two builds from 24th December 1999 and January 2000 have existed online for a while now, though thanks to Mark Greenshields, we have been able to recover a staggering 33 prototype builds of the game, starting with the earliest from the 14th December 1999 and finishing with the very last build on the 13th April 2000 (going beyond the date suggested by Quang).

The very last build unfortunately seems to crash during the levels, and is where Quang has integrated the music into the game. This correlates with Quang saying that the final build really broke when he tried adding the soundtrack. It might be possible to get it working, so if anyone is able to stop it from crashing and get the sound going – please let us know.

However, there are earlier builds from around late February to early March 2000 which do have in-game music (which we think might be placeholder like the title screen music).

As you would expect, you can see a clear evolution of the game, with the cars first being added and AI added, and the addition and evolving of the game menus throughout. At a later stage, you can collect power ups and have a race with the other cars.

You’ll see that later prototypes, the scrolling gets a bit slower/jerkier, and is likely where Quang was having the memory issues. Interestingly, there are GSRACE builds which are extremely fast and smooth with the scrolling and movement from late March 2000 – where it seems a lot was dropped from the game to get the speed up.

There is a lot to digest overall with this many builds (and some of the differences ones from the same period are likely very minimal), but if you spot anything of interest that we haven’t mentioned – please do get in touch and we’ll update this page with credit to yourself. In addition to the builds, we have added the game design documents which give an interesting insight into the plans for the game overall.

Additionally, I have reconstructed the level maps and added them to a gallery below, so that you can see them in full. This is along with a number of other assets and bits of graphics recovered. We hope you enjoy going through them all and hopefully we’ll learn more soon in the future about the title.

With a huge thank you to Mark Greenshields for allowing us to preserve prototypes for this game.