1993-1994 Teeny Weeny Games
Platforms: Super Nintendo, Amiga, PC, Philips CD-i, Amiga CD32
Next into the Games That Weren’t archives is an unfinished western-themed SNES game commissioned by Teeny Weeny Games in the early 1990s. The game only had a working name of Teeny Weeny Western and was developed around 1993. The project was coded entirely in 65816 assembly using original DOS-based SNES development tools and period hardware. Although commercially funded, the game was never completed or released.
The recovered materials we have here were preserved by Michael Archer, with original graphics by Paul (DOKK) Docherty. The game was designed by Angela Sutherland in collaboration with Colin Fuidge. Looking back, the programmer notes that they never fully connected with the game’s design vision, and the exact reasons the project stalled are now unclear.
The game was also in fact not just planned for the SNES, but the likes of PC and Amiga, and was featured in the press with more advanced screens showing characters moving around the map. It seems that the game may have got further on other platforms compared to the SNES.
The magazines reveal that you can take the role of a cowboy, rancher, trader or other person of the Wild West, where its all about trade and combat. Native Americans feature within the game, and there was to be a canoe trip on the river. CVG mentions the SNES edition specifically, and that the game was to be a cross between Monkey Island, Zelda and Carry on Cowboy – which explains the humour with the title screen where the cowboy falls from his horse.
CVG also reveals that you can go rustling, buy and sell horses, gamble in the local saloon and even get involved in drunken punch-ups. Angela Sutherland told the magazine that “We are aiming to make the game as real life as possible. At least as real as you can be with berserk cartoon characters”. The game was due for release at that point for Christmas 1993 – but was of course never to be.
By June 1994, the game featured in Amiga Pro magazine – where it was revealed that the game had been worked on for just over a year and it is only mentioned that the game was developed on Amiga. So perhaps it had been decided to cancel the SNES version very early on due to cartridge costs or issues finding a publisher?
We got in touch with Paul Docherty, who hadn’t thought of the game for a long time. He felt personally that it was a title that he wasn’t a good fit for, feeling that he had struggled to animate the horses or cartoonize characters within the game that well. In general, he felt no real connection with the genre and as a result found the project a struggle. Paul got on well with the team though, but recalls there being tension between the producer and the programmer, as the game wasn’t coming together in a way that met expectations – and could therefore explain why it was eventually cancelled.
Paul was quite tough on himself regarding the project – there was expectation from others that he’d be great on the project, and as a result wanted to do well and felt he didn’t. I personally feel that the work that Paul did (and what we have seen so far) was great, but it’s one he’d rather forget and he has no further materials relating to the game to be preserved. You must respect that sometimes with certain projects, and I can resonate with that – some projects you just prefer to bury and forget.
Coming back to the SNES archive that Michael has recovered – the archive preserved needed some reconstruction from Michael to get it all going, but he has reassembled the original source into a working SNES .SMC binary, restoring the intro, logo and menu systems that had previously been stripped out. Most supporting systems are present, but the core gameplay logic was never finished.
Technically, the project includes Mode 1 backgrounds, a small Mode 7 logo effect, a custom strip-based scrolling engine, DMA-driven VRAM updates, bespoke compression and extensive debug tools. A very large tile-based world map was planned, using three character tile sets with shared data – but the full map never got to be implemented.
To visualise more of how the game could have looked, Michael has reconstructed and merged the original map graphics into a single image which you can see above and in the gallery, showing what the complete game world may have looked like.
All original artwork by Paul survives, created using CRISP2, a licensed tool by Carl Muller that remains difficult to run even today. The repository includes all original source code, tools, assets and a runnable ROM exactly as they existed, with no refactoring or completion of unfinished systems – and can be downloaded here or via Michael’s own Git repository.
Although there isn’t a huge amount to see, its great to see some of Paul’s lost artwork once again and an early glimpse of what could have been perhaps a SNES precursor to Red Dead Redemption? We’ll never know sadly! We just hope that in the future we might be able to find more of the game, and perhaps a more advanced Amiga development considering it had been worked on for over a year.
With thanks to Michael Archer for preserving and sharing details about the development, Paul Docherty for sharing recollections about the development, GzegzolkaDA for the heads up about the Amiga version and Archive.org / Stephen Stuttard for the scans.
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