It's LJN. They did this all over the gaming world in the 80s, using concept stills for ads that don't reflect anything from the game. Look at BTF the video game.
Oh definitely. There's also some concept screenshots of Karate Kid that look more like a master system game. But I like to think there's really an Elm Street prototype where you play as Freddy, I'd love to see it someday, if it exists.
Fax like not even just myths like when people say this person is bad and just say they touched children and leave it there like show me why you believe that instead of acting like I’m a stupid sheep for not blindly believing you
It's so funny how those of us who grew up before the internet still had these same weird experiences. I totally remember something about a Freddy game where you played as Freddy, and I grew up thinking I was the only one who wondered about that game.
I never actually played the released game, and up until a few years ago when I saw it on UA-cam I always thought you played as Freddy in the game because I remember seeing these early promotional images. In fact, it was almost a kind of "Mandela effect" thing for me, because for years I always thought there was a Friday the 13th game where you fought against Jason, and a Nightmare game where you played as Freddy.
I was one of those jerk liar kids that spread rumors about "insider game knowledge", i told other kids that the "Play as Freddy game" used the power glove to control the razor claws and it was the only way to win. As an adult, i now apologize to the world for being such an asshole, i'm sorry.
Yeah, I though about that at the end when he asked about how people feels about the game most likely not being real. I felt absolutely nothing, but it's definitely a cool thing to hear Whang talk about. I do like how guys will get to the bottom of stories like this, THAT's some interesting and very impressive stuff!
@@hawktalon7890 he really could. I love Whang's dulcet tones and his glorious facial hair. Livestream with facecam, just reading weird fanfic or a dictionary.
Umm what? You don't have to invested in the topic/thing. I don't think you were invested in the video where a guy breaks a glass jar in his ass. or even the cum jar lol creators like Justin makes even weird things like that interesting. It's more about the creator and the way they present/explain things is what makes you invested. Also hard to be invested in something that didnt exist
The white artifact on the screen, and the blurry, gritty texture of the overworld, could all just be artifacts which have been caused by static, from taking a picture of a CRT tv screen, with a low quality camera. I'm not saying it's certain, but taking a screenshot of a game, especially with the curvature of an old CRT screen, wasn't as easy as it is today. Which could also be why things don't line up on a perfect grid. Also, the kid sprite not being placed on the same level of ground, could imply that you had up and down movement, as well as left and right, perhaps to interact with objects in the background, or move through doors. These are all just guesses though, but given that Freddy is placed higher, I would think that up and down movement is possible, and would be similar in gameplay style to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, another LJN title.
Now you should do a video on who won the "Be in my Nightmare sweepstakes" it was a contest to promote Nightmare on elm Street part 3, the winner would get a chance to have a walk on role for part 4, but no one seems to know who won, so that should be a future video.
On the promotional ad I noticed: "In the event the walk-on part in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 is not available, the alternate grand prize of $5,000 will be rewarded automatically." I would have guessed cash payout, but I guess that's the most interesting part, whether or not it even happened.
There's exceptions to everything. The biggest reason that you normally have the sprites just flip along their axis is to save space on cart, like Whang mentioned. It means that the character has half as much sprite data on the cart, which is a huge save.
River City Ransom was a beat them all with relatively unique mechanics for its time. I doubt a game published by LJN would be so creative. Mostly if it's from a licensed IP.
There’s an episode of AVGN where he looks at old Christmas catalogs. In this episode, he noted that the screenshot for LJN’s Karate Kid adaptation was totally different from the final game. Check it out. I think this theory is correct - LJN would create mock-ups for how the game would look, and they’d send those materials to marketing and press outlets for print.
The problem with that last part of the "wealthy stingy collector" is that one of those guys couldn't help but to show it off and brag about having it in some way. Whether they made a UA-cam video showing it or whatever it just seems 99% unlikely.
I remember those nightmare on Elm Street ads in the old Game Magazines... Here's the problem: Have you ever been in a Walmart circa 1990's and asked where the "game magazines" are?😐 Never ask to see Game Magazines 😥
They definitely used fake images for some games in advertising. I remember seeing Jaws for the NES being advertised in the Sears catalog. There was a scene where you were dropping barrel shaped depth charges in the catalog, but its not anywhere in the game. The closest thing to that is dropping those round cartoon bombs from a boat.
To be fair, NES games started looking much better by the end of the system's lifecycle. This is true of all consoles, but it's most noticable in the NES. Compare, say, Super Mario Bros to Kirby's Adventure. Some games managed to pull off some truly insane graphical improvements and effects! Honestly, there might be a prototype cartridge out there...but if there is, it's heavily unfinished. The minor issues in the screenshots could easily be brushed off for one reason or another. Awkward shots, screen blur...lots of things. But the limitations of the NES would make these graphics very difficult to pull off in 1990. If those are real, it's early as hell prototype.
@@shiftfire4511 i think Kirby's Adventure was possible with expansion chips like the MMC3. Same thing applies to SMB2, Megaman, SMB3, Contra, Ninja Gaiden etc. Super Mario Bros was an early NES game and it pushed the NES' stock hardware to its limits without the need of extra chips that expand the capabilities since most of the early NES/Famicom games were arcade style games.
@@vincenzomottola7778 Indeed. However, the MMC4 chip was released in 1988. Heck, the MMC5 chip was released in February 1990. It would have been more than possible for this game to have been developed with the MMC4, maybe even the MMC5.
@@shiftfire4511 the MMC5 had so much potential, too bad very few games utilized it because it was expensive to manufacture. They could have just made an MMC5 adapter for the NES that uses small cartridges that only contain the ROM. It would have reduced production costs instead of just printing individual cartridges with all the necessary components inside
@@vincenzomottola7778 Well, someone tried something similar. Look up the "Aladdin Deck Enhancer" . But by the time the MMC5 and MMC6 chips actually released, the NES was about to be succeeded.
The thing about some collector possibly having the one copy of a prototype was interesting to me. Apparently that kind of thing goes on in music collecting circles as well. I'm a big fan of Queen, and there's one original song of theirs that they never put on an album or single, but played live for a while in the '70s. Supposedly, though, one private collector has had a copy of the never-released studio version for years, but has never shared it once. As far as I know, the band themselves has never confirmed they did make a studio recording of the song, and their "official archivist" denies it exists. Though, I'm inclined to believe the collector, as he seems like a pretty reputable guy from what I've seen of him....I'd like to see someone do a "Whang-style" video on that little mystery, lol (search "Queen hangman" on youtube, if anyone's curious and wants to hear a live version, btw, it's actually a pretty cool song!)
It's paying the bills man, totally understand, and Raid S.L. may be annoying and something I will never play but it's not like it's an actual bad thing to be advertising. And I'm glad Justin is doing good and making good content.
@@trinidad17 Yeah that’s why he does it lol. Don’t think he would be doing it for free. But you can tell it’s his least favorite ad read. The fake enthusiasm is hilarious. And it’s to be expected, RAID is one of the collectively most hated ad reads across UA-cam.
I believe there is a prototype where you control Freddy since that would explain why the base form Freddy used when time runs out and for the final battle is so weak. It was meant to be a player asset.
@@originaluseername No, Sandy Vajayjay, I'm amused by how Mr Whang and others like him who quote online users just use their usernames no differently than they would their birth names. Had nothing to do with the specific username in question.
A lot of the inconsistencies mentioned such as the wide child or weird windows or the dirt could be explained by the images being displayed on one of those old bubble crt tv's and photographed. A lot of these inconsistencies take place toward the side or corners of the image and could be explained by the slight warping effect the edge of these CRT screens have.
Yeah, I feel like CRT distortion explains the wider kid. He's closer to the right side of the screen where most CRTs are more susceptible to stretching and warping. That could probably also explain why the dirt looks so inconsistent, albeit there are still way too many different dirt tiles. Maybe that's why this prototype was cancelled; it was just too ambitious for the NES. The way the colors look and the specific rough-around-the-edges-of-certain-colors video artifacts that only an NES could produce makes me think these aren't mockup images. Then again, there are other prototype screenshots that use completely different, simpler graphics for Freddy and the kids.
@1111 fungus Creating what must be like 25+ different tiles just to make the plain dirt ground look less repetitive is kind of ridiculously wasteful given the really limited capacity you have on the NES. You can only fit so much, are you gonna blow your allotted space on a bunch of really minute detail that will barely be appreciated, or will you use it for more significant level assets and character sprites? There may also be a matter of how many different tiles you could have loaded into memory at once, which something like this would be a flagrant misuse of.
Actually this was debated back then, but the problem with that conclusion is that all of the other LJN pictures and mock-ups all look clean by comparison and lack any of that extreme artifacting which would then only be present in these specific screenshots and not any of their other games. At the point where this game was being made they had the technology to get decent looking screen shots of actual NES hardware game play. In fact the artifacting could actually be counter-argued as evidence it was done on a computer or some device they didn't have good ways to get decent looking screen shots of since it wasn't on an actual NES.
Another giveaway: Every sprite on the NES is made up of 8x8 pixel squares, and the NES only allows 8 of these squares to appear in a row at the same time, yet in the screenshot of Snake Freddy, his tail appears to be about 7 squares long, and the boy's body about 3 squares wide, so it would be impossible to fully render them standing next to each other.
It still just weirds me out that two of my nerdy obsessions (unreleased games and Nightmare on Elm Street) collided and I had never heard about it until Whang's video, lol
Almost all these comparison shots could be explained by artifacting from lossless-to-lossy conversion and photo scanning, which distorts pixel art specifically worse than photos (and is especially distorted at the edges of sprites).
It is slightly more obscure piece of trivia, but the frequency with which it is being repeated ,is slowly closing in on "Did you know Super Mario Bros 2 is not actually SMB2?"
I remember playing something that resembled the top-down look of this game, but it wasn't on NES, it was on PC, only I don't remember what O/S it was... Just that it wasn't Windows, was in the early 90s, and the computer I was on was black and white. It was a computer my sister had acquired from a neighbor. The menu system was like all text, 3 menus side by side that dropped down and expanded to other stuff. Had a word processor, spreadsheet, all that. 5 1/4 disk drive in it. Oh, and it definitely was Nightmare on Elm Street too. Never saw any side-scroll, but the top-down? Exploring the neighborhood? Yes, I remember that. Edit: I do remember Freddy walking around the town, but the movement was such that literally the whole screen moved with him, so it looked choppy and the sprite wasn't animated to more than two frames. Never saw him transform into anything, or take a single life though. Town was medium size, and I don't remember figuring out how to enter a building or do anything useful in it. It was sort of maze-like, roads that came in front of and behind buildings, buildings arranged so that one had to decide on a proper route to get to certain points. I'm afraid it's a bit foggy, it has been some time though.
That little guy on the bottom-right makes every Whang video worth it. I remember Justin saying: "this is my new favorite thing now" and linking the raw version of the video back in the days when I used Twitter.
Sweet shirt! I have a feeling that you might have been at those Queens Elks Lodge shows - those were amazing times. I remember New Jack standing outside the front entrance, above the entry line, and I could see how scarred his forehead was from blading himself. I got to see Muffin Ass and Amish Roadkill there, too. Keep up the great work!
Yo Whang, can I put you in a (NOT FOR PROFIT) game with Internet Historian, Ordinary Things, and SumitoMedia as a cameo/easter egg? It's a real thing thats happening and we have a crew making it. If not it's cool, but I think everyone would love you being a secret boss in an RPG.
@@dr.skinnypenis2078 it's not Barkley 3, lmfao. But GOD, what if it was. Although the proof of concept was indeed made on RPG Maker! We've switched to Unity though because even though you can make some cool stuff on it, it is not made for a team of people to use.
I'm an NES collector myself. The issue comes down for some prototype collectors that they're afraid the prototype will devalue once its been "dumped," the term for having its ROM image copied from the prototype board. Some have their prototypes dumped to protect the ROM because bit rot can begin to occur after 25 or so years. The other issue comes down to who do you trust. Some collectors have a wide circle of fellow collectors they can partner with to get what they need done. Others, such as myself, prefer to keep what I have for the most part private. I do own 3 prototypes carts, two undumped and one dumped. The dumped one is identical to the retail release. The other two have sat in my collection for a few years now and I've made efforts to get them dumped. Seeing as I don't know any collectors with the ability to dump them for me, I'm hesitant to send them anywhere out of fear of theft or getting lost in the mail. There's a lot more to consider than just "getting it out there to the people."
Mario literally pronounces his own name multiple times throughout history and he never sais it in a boston accent LOL ill never understand why people think it's pronounced like this 5:48
2:09 The cutting room floor!! fuck yeah I know it very well, and I love it, so much useful info and such a well designed website, one of my favorites out there
I think another important thing about this is Freddy's snake tail. One thing the NES does not like is long horizontal stretches of sprites. it can only render 8 per line and that snake form looks like it takes up at least five horizontally. Would experienced NES developers like Rare really design a form like that knowing full well it would force horrible flicker? I know it could just be a momentary transition animation but still.
The combination of colored lights in your room makes for very weird light effects on your face. Once you notice it, you can't unsee it, and it drives me crazy
I actually really respect the fact that you came back to fix your mistake without covering the tracks of the fact that a mistake was made in the first place.
"altough it seems strange to me that the game would be in that stage and they spend money on advertisement" well, seems like he never heard about the story of doom from 3do
I dont really understand the collector thing. I get they dont want to depreciate their collection of rare stuff by having it dumped... but when it's so niche that no ones knows it exists and you're just going to keep it secretly locked away, that's just wierd right?
lol is this the same Armageddon Potato that has a store in Sacramento? Shout out to him, met up with him a couple times, had some good conversations about vintage games. Great guy!
I remembered this happening with the Karate Champ game for NES. There was a level where you fought a bull on the box art but after hundreds of hours of gameplay i never got the bullfight stage...
Can't believe this was ever an issue. I have old catalogs from the 80s with all kinds of fake screenshots for games that actually came out. Some were even already released... like they just paid someone to make an image since they couldn't get an official one.
You know what would be awesome? A Freddy VS Jason multiplayer vertical scrolling dungeon crawler game (with 2D platforming and puzzle sequences as in Goonies 2), where you are the prey and gotta bait one villain to meet the other in hope they mutually destroy each other. You gotta fetch objects to get Dream Mana (or challenge Jason or Freddy to a difficult duel to farm some). It allows you bypass obstacles, locked areas or just keep away the killers with weapons or superpowers. The more DM you have, the less conspicuous you are, which forces you to spend it conservatively. The winner just happens to be the one waking up first. A score in red font would display at the upper left, adding up every time you get slain. The lower it is, the more it proves how good you are at the game.
My daughter really loves those 4 animated screens with the different games in your background, specifically the one with among us animation. Where did you find those?
I agree with you on that yes, these screenshots are mock-ups, but that doesn't disprove the existence of the prototype. It could be out there...somewhere, it just probably doesn't look a thing like the screenshots.
I used to make sprite comics and I for one am convinced this is a mock-up. Sprite art for games and sprite art for art is extremely different and specifically made as such. This looks like it was rendered for promo material.
Is it possible that the weird inconsistencies with sprites could be because the screenshots came from a development kit build? Like, one that wasn’t scaled back to run well on the NES
Maybe try the social media accounts of some of the former Rare staff from that time? They would be the mostly likely to know if the "play as Freddy" version of the game was ever playable or if it was just an idea they had on the drawing board.
if the dot is in the same place, its a dead pixel on the TV, "back in the day" you couldn't just take screenshots of things, you had to take an actual picture with an actual camera of the thing on your screen, and its before the day of digital cameras really, but digital monitors, were a thing back then. they were big, expensive, and usually in the workplace, but they did exist.
A lot of publishers at the time wouldn't have a working build of the game by the time they started running ads, so they'd simply create mockups using DPaint or something.
as someone who has used photoshop a lot too draw,. Jpeg compression can account for a lot of distortion and pixels being off by one or two pixels. making the same sprite look slightly different. Jpeg compression can also add random specs too the ground.
iirc there wasn't a screen capture thing for these magazines they would literally take pics of a TV screen, so the white speck could be on the screen or the screens scanlines/pixels and interact with the camera's sensor interacting with the was sprites look and making the ground pattern look more random
Just a thought regarding the dirt graphics. If you were to make 4 or 5 square assets that had varied divots/holes in them, each one could exist rotated in 4 positions and mirrored in 4 positions, assuming we have 5 tiles that can then exist in 8 potential positions, leaving a total of 40 potential iterations of dirt tiles from 5 asset blocks. Considering the area the dirt covers, if you were to randomly fill the field with these 5 tiles in random orientations, it would be extremely hard to find the pattern. Maybe that is why it ALMOST looks like a pattern, but it also doesn't.
There’s a possibility they’re real, the unreleased power glove games have footage with extremely good graphics for the systems hardware. Perhaps some prototypes made on the engine were downscaled before release
When I was five my family drove to Pennsylvania to visit some extended family where I stayed a night or two at an aunt's house. One of the main memories that stuck with me was watching my cousin play a Nightmare on Elm st game but I suppose it could have been a Jason game. I just know it was based off a popular horror film so naturally I was terrified....
When I saw the title I thought you were gonna say the pages were photoshopped or something, but the screenshots being mockups and not from a finished prototype does make a lot of sense
Later games tended to have much more room for CHR-ROM data than SMB did, because they used more advanced mappers. It's possible that several metatiles were used to combine the same tiles of dots into several different arrangements, making the ground look a bit more random and less repetitive than in some other games. (Note that there are still patterns and repeating dots.) A lot of the minor variations, like differences in sizes, alignments, broader lines, etc., could be attributed to the fuzziness and the lower-quality printed image on the poster. Remember that we're probably looking at a CRT TV screen shot with a 35mm camera, not exactly the most pixel-perfect way to capture an image. Also, (assuming it's not a mock-up) I suspect that the yellow lights would've been produced using sprites instead of background tiles, in which case the sprites could have been shifted slightly one way or the other without taking up additional CHR-ROM space. None of this is to say it's definitely not a mock-up, just that the evidence here is not conclusive.
What's more likely is that the original prototype played almost exactly like the retail game, but had you controlling Freddy and maybe different art for each kid and bad guy in the game. Then when the opportunity to swap plot happened, they just swapped a bunch of the assets in the game and maybe that took a bit longer than expected.
Remember though, the screenshots are not just fakes, they're obvious fakes that were probably made in an art tool, and don't even seem to contain any real game assets. This points to the game simply not existing; the only other possibility is that it does exist but doesn't look like the screenshots, and there is literally no evidence for this being the case.
@@pentelegomenon1175 You're missing the point of my comment, I'm not talking about the prototype as presented in those fake photos, what I'm talking about is the fact that for so long of the announcement of this game they kept the plot the same as you controlling Freddy up until the game was pretty much released. There is no way that they built from the ground up the game that got released in the amount of time when they switched from Freddy being the vocal point to you playing as one of the teenagers in springwood. so it probably happened was they were making the game that got released, but Freddy was the playable character up until a certain point before release.
Part 1: ua-cam.com/video/1UgzWqtAag4/v-deo.html
Cool.
epic
I'm wondering if you'd be interested in doing a video about the infamous Final Fantasy House? That might be a little too overdone though, IDK.
@@retroroy8720 watch the Down The Rabbit Hole video
So, that's another nine minute plus video saying pretty much nothing, rehashing what was already obvious. Thanks.
It's LJN. They did this all over the gaming world in the 80s, using concept stills for ads that don't reflect anything from the game. Look at BTF the video game.
Oh definitely. There's also some concept screenshots of Karate Kid that look more like a master system game. But I like to think there's really an Elm Street prototype where you play as Freddy, I'd love to see it someday, if it exists.
I don't have any friends because they are ashamed of the videos I upload. Are they really that bad, dear tony
@@AxxLAfriku go see a doctor, seriously
Back to the Future the video game was a mistake. Super Back to the Future was SOOOOOO much better.
@Zombie Don’t tell mentally ill people to do that if you aren’t prepared for what could happen.
I can't stand those game collectors that just hoard prototypes and rare games without dumping the rom online or showing it off
It's like the kids on the schoolground.
They just want to have them and not let anyone else have them.
You're not entitled to free shit
Information wants to be free. Also I doubt it's *their* software to begin with.
Exactly, it's not their software. That's why they shouldn't dump it.
The show hoarders needs to a special of these types of hoarders
It annoys me when people goes "it's fake" and moves on, but I love it when people can prove that it's fake in very fine detail.
It always doubles as an education on how these machines we all owned actually worked, which is really cool.
Like Saki Sanobashi for example. Nobody proved its fake with detail. The "OP" is not really the OP.
Fax like not even just myths like when people say this person is bad and just say they touched children and leave it there like show me why you believe that instead of acting like I’m a stupid sheep for not blindly believing you
It's fake. Now I'm moving on.
@@BrotherBogdan_ lol
It's so funny how those of us who grew up before the internet still had these same weird experiences. I totally remember something about a Freddy game where you played as Freddy, and I grew up thinking I was the only one who wondered about that game.
Jaames baxter
I never actually played the released game, and up until a few years ago when I saw it on UA-cam I always thought you played as Freddy in the game because I remember seeing these early promotional images. In fact, it was almost a kind of "Mandela effect" thing for me, because for years I always thought there was a Friday the 13th game where you fought against Jason, and a Nightmare game where you played as Freddy.
Could be a false memory, happens all the time. Vsauce did a great video on it in his minefield series
I was one of those jerk liar kids that spread rumors about "insider game knowledge", i told other kids that the "Play as Freddy game" used the power glove to control the razor claws and it was the only way to win. As an adult, i now apologize to the world for being such an asshole, i'm sorry.
Freddy's game was a dream all along
The real game was the friends he killed along the way.
@@TJDious beat me to it lol
It's about the dreams we had a long the way
If you grab onto it in your dream and then wake up, it will be in the real world.
Ad I keep getting for this vid is the Coors light Dream-Game bullshit ad. I bet the AI thinks it's pretty goddamn clever.
I'm not even that invested in this game, but Whang just makes everything interesting.
Yeah, I though about that at the end when he asked about how people feels about the game most likely not being real. I felt absolutely nothing, but it's definitely a cool thing to hear Whang talk about. I do like how guys will get to the bottom of stories like this, THAT's some interesting and very impressive stuff!
Oh, we have the exact same thoughts. This guy could make a livestream of reading the dictionary intriguing.
@@hawktalon7890 he really could. I love Whang's dulcet tones and his glorious facial hair. Livestream with facecam, just reading weird fanfic or a dictionary.
Umm what? You don't have to invested in the topic/thing. I don't think you were invested in the video where a guy breaks a glass jar in his ass. or even the cum jar lol creators like Justin makes even weird things like that interesting. It's more about the creator and the way they present/explain things is what makes you invested. Also hard to be invested in something that didnt exist
@@mojavecourier6987 You misunderstood me to the point you wrote an essay.
The white artifact on the screen, and the blurry, gritty texture of the overworld, could all just be artifacts which have been caused by static, from taking a picture of a CRT tv screen, with a low quality camera. I'm not saying it's certain, but taking a screenshot of a game, especially with the curvature of an old CRT screen, wasn't as easy as it is today. Which could also be why things don't line up on a perfect grid. Also, the kid sprite not being placed on the same level of ground, could imply that you had up and down movement, as well as left and right, perhaps to interact with objects in the background, or move through doors. These are all just guesses though, but given that Freddy is placed higher, I would think that up and down movement is possible, and would be similar in gameplay style to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, another LJN title.
They had some ways to take screenshots from the development tools as far as I understand. But yeah an NES Elgato wasnt on Amazon yet lol
Now you should do a video on who won the "Be in my Nightmare sweepstakes" it was a contest to promote Nightmare on elm Street part 3, the winner would get a chance to have a walk on role for part 4, but no one seems to know who won, so that should be a future video.
On the promotional ad I noticed:
"In the event the walk-on part in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 is not available, the alternate grand prize of $5,000 will be rewarded automatically."
I would have guessed cash payout, but I guess that's the most interesting part, whether or not it even happened.
@@airix10 Oh ok, but still he should make an episode.
I still have hope this will surface, but it's doubtful.
Hey everybody you got John Riggs here!
Mock-up theory looks pretty sound though
After almost 40 years, it wouldve happened by now.
Honey doesn't seem to be working on my Temple IOS browser
You haven't made enough prayers and offers.
Have you bugged enough luminescent government workers yet?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
If you're using Temple you're already in the land of (Milk and) Honey
Temple ios, may as well be real since mac is an unusable mess for schizophrenics
Didn’t river city ransom have characters that walked different ways and on different vertical positions?
AKA the song from the game that plays during Whang's advertisements
Yeah. But generally in that sort of game there’s a much wider plane to walk on. This one looks mostly flat and they’re just positioned differently
There's exceptions to everything. The biggest reason that you normally have the sprites just flip along their axis is to save space on cart, like Whang mentioned. It means that the character has half as much sprite data on the cart, which is a huge save.
River City Ransom was a beat them all with relatively unique mechanics for its time. I doubt a game published by LJN would be so creative. Mostly if it's from a licensed IP.
@@JustinWhangYt please do more video game vids like this :)
There’s an episode of AVGN where he looks at old Christmas catalogs. In this episode, he noted that the screenshot for LJN’s Karate Kid adaptation was totally different from the final game. Check it out. I think this theory is correct - LJN would create mock-ups for how the game would look, and they’d send those materials to marketing and press outlets for print.
The problem with that last part of the "wealthy stingy collector" is that one of those guys couldn't help but to show it off and brag about having it in some way. Whether they made a UA-cam video showing it or whatever it just seems 99% unlikely.
Still wish this game was real so Whang could play it in his livestreams!
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I read this as "I wish Whang was real like in his livestreams" I don't know why I even have eyes
I misread the title as "The lost farm game isn't fake?" and I almost had a heart attack
Freddy doesn't tire himself hiding a body from the police, pal. Haha
you blind
well this aged poorly
I remember those nightmare on Elm Street ads in the old Game Magazines...
Here's the problem: Have you ever been in a Walmart circa 1990's and asked where the "game magazines" are?😐
Never ask to see Game Magazines 😥
Oh nooo
@@jamesthomas8645 oh yeees
That's where I met Dan Schneider
uh... huh?
I'm sorry I don't get it and I'm an 80s baby wtf you talking bout?
>Thursday morning
>Eating some breakfast
>Whang uploads a new video
Life’s good.
_Armageddon Potato_ is an amusing username. First one I've ever encountered was _Angry Buddha_ waaaaay back in college.
Good names like that stay in your head
Never forget WormtheEternal.
Armageddon Potato is Legit, been on NA for years before it disappeared.
What is NA for us uninitiated?
@@GreenSharder Nintendo Age
@@GreenSharder Nintendo age, he says it in the video
They definitely used fake images for some games in advertising. I remember seeing Jaws for the NES being advertised in the Sears catalog. There was a scene where you were dropping barrel shaped depth charges in the catalog, but its not anywhere in the game. The closest thing to that is dropping those round cartoon bombs from a boat.
Those screenshots look about as much like an NES game as the game Brecken Meyer played in Freddy's Dead.
To be fair, NES games started looking much better by the end of the system's lifecycle. This is true of all consoles, but it's most noticable in the NES. Compare, say, Super Mario Bros to Kirby's Adventure.
Some games managed to pull off some truly insane graphical improvements and effects!
Honestly, there might be a prototype cartridge out there...but if there is, it's heavily unfinished. The minor issues in the screenshots could easily be brushed off for one reason or another. Awkward shots, screen blur...lots of things.
But the limitations of the NES would make these graphics very difficult to pull off in 1990. If those are real, it's early as hell prototype.
@@shiftfire4511 i think Kirby's Adventure was possible with expansion chips like the MMC3. Same thing applies to SMB2, Megaman, SMB3, Contra, Ninja Gaiden etc.
Super Mario Bros was an early NES game and it pushed the NES' stock hardware to its limits without the need of extra chips that expand the capabilities since most of the early NES/Famicom games were arcade style games.
@@vincenzomottola7778 Indeed. However, the MMC4 chip was released in 1988. Heck, the MMC5 chip was released in February 1990.
It would have been more than possible for this game to have been developed with the MMC4, maybe even the MMC5.
@@shiftfire4511 the MMC5 had so much potential, too bad very few games utilized it because it was expensive to manufacture. They could have just made an MMC5 adapter for the NES that uses small cartridges that only contain the ROM. It would have reduced production costs instead of just printing individual cartridges with all the necessary components inside
@@vincenzomottola7778 Well, someone tried something similar. Look up the "Aladdin Deck Enhancer" .
But by the time the MMC5 and MMC6 chips actually released, the NES was about to be succeeded.
I feel sad for alot of museums missing out on alot of historical materials in relation to gaming
Ecw shirt, hell yeah
Oh my god
You seem very suspicious about the shirt
Electronic cock worms, hell yeah
Rob Van Whang my favorite wrestler
@@emineomax You seem very sus for saying they're very sus for the t-shirt. Hrmmm... 🤔
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
well we got one but I don't think it's a one you like
I'm saving one bullet just for me.
Patrolling the Nuclear winter almost makes you wish for a mojave
gentile
Mutie
The thing about some collector possibly having the one copy of a prototype was interesting to me. Apparently that kind of thing goes on in music collecting circles as well. I'm a big fan of Queen, and there's one original song of theirs that they never put on an album or single, but played live for a while in the '70s. Supposedly, though, one private collector has had a copy of the never-released studio version for years, but has never shared it once. As far as I know, the band themselves has never confirmed they did make a studio recording of the song, and their "official archivist" denies it exists. Though, I'm inclined to believe the collector, as he seems like a pretty reputable guy from what I've seen of him....I'd like to see someone do a "Whang-style" video on that little mystery, lol
(search "Queen hangman" on youtube, if anyone's curious and wants to hear a live version, btw, it's actually a pretty cool song!)
I miss the RAIDs ads where you can tell he didn’t really want to be reading em lol.
It's paying the bills man, totally understand, and Raid S.L. may be annoying and something I will never play but it's not like it's an actual bad thing to be advertising. And I'm glad Justin is doing good and making good content.
@@trinidad17
Yeah that’s why he does it lol. Don’t think he would be doing it for free.
But you can tell it’s his least favorite ad read. The fake enthusiasm is hilarious. And it’s to be expected, RAID is one of the collectively most hated ad reads across UA-cam.
I believe there is a prototype where you control Freddy since that would explain why the base form Freddy used when time runs out and for the final battle is so weak. It was meant to be a player asset.
I deal with hoarder-collectors too in niche film/tv preservation. I love bursting their bubbles when we find it after all and share it online.
"His name is Armageddon Potato."
I love UA-cam community culture.
so essentially “I love overused cliché unfunny ‘jokes’ as if saying ‘potato’ on its own is an amazing fucking joke”
@@originaluseername No, Sandy Vajayjay, I'm amused by how Mr Whang and others like him who quote online users just use their usernames no differently than they would their birth names. Had nothing to do with the specific username in question.
@@TJDious “sandy vajayjay”
where did that even come from
A lot of the inconsistencies mentioned such as the wide child or weird windows or the dirt could be explained by the images being displayed on one of those old bubble crt tv's and photographed. A lot of these inconsistencies take place toward the side or corners of the image and could be explained by the slight warping effect the edge of these CRT screens have.
@1111 fungus Did you forget this was LJN?
Yeah, I feel like CRT distortion explains the wider kid. He's closer to the right side of the screen where most CRTs are more susceptible to stretching and warping. That could probably also explain why the dirt looks so inconsistent, albeit there are still way too many different dirt tiles.
Maybe that's why this prototype was cancelled; it was just too ambitious for the NES. The way the colors look and the specific rough-around-the-edges-of-certain-colors video artifacts that only an NES could produce makes me think these aren't mockup images. Then again, there are other prototype screenshots that use completely different, simpler graphics for Freddy and the kids.
@1111 fungus Creating what must be like 25+ different tiles just to make the plain dirt ground look less repetitive is kind of ridiculously wasteful given the really limited capacity you have on the NES. You can only fit so much, are you gonna blow your allotted space on a bunch of really minute detail that will barely be appreciated, or will you use it for more significant level assets and character sprites?
There may also be a matter of how many different tiles you could have loaded into memory at once, which something like this would be a flagrant misuse of.
Actually this was debated back then, but the problem with that conclusion is that all of the other LJN pictures and mock-ups all look clean by comparison and lack any of that extreme artifacting which would then only be present in these specific screenshots and not any of their other games. At the point where this game was being made they had the technology to get decent looking screen shots of actual NES hardware game play. In fact the artifacting could actually be counter-argued as evidence it was done on a computer or some device they didn't have good ways to get decent looking screen shots of since it wasn't on an actual NES.
@1111 fungus That's an infinitely less likely explanation than them being mockups.
nope,
it ain't nightmare on elm street,
it's Boo! Haunted House
4:32 Loved that GOODFELLAS reference!!!!
Another giveaway: Every sprite on the NES is made up of 8x8 pixel squares, and the NES only allows 8 of these squares to appear in a row at the same time, yet in the screenshot of Snake Freddy, his tail appears to be about 7 squares long, and the boy's body about 3 squares wide, so it would be impossible to fully render them standing next to each other.
For the Nightmare of Elm Street game we did get, Rare was the developer. Perhaps one of the original team has the answers.
It still just weirds me out that two of my nerdy obsessions (unreleased games and Nightmare on Elm Street) collided and I had never heard about it until Whang's video, lol
Almost all these comparison shots could be explained by artifacting from lossless-to-lossy conversion and photo scanning, which distorts pixel art specifically worse than photos (and is especially distorted at the edges of sprites).
ECW - Sabu shirt...nice. Miss those old days.
omg I never noticed that about SMB
I’m 43 and I feel like my world has been rocked.
It is slightly more obscure piece of trivia, but the frequency with which it is being repeated ,is slowly closing in on "Did you know Super Mario Bros 2 is not actually SMB2?"
I never saw the grass and cloud similarities in Mario and now I can’t unsee it
I remember playing something that resembled the top-down look of this game, but it wasn't on NES, it was on PC, only I don't remember what O/S it was... Just that it wasn't Windows, was in the early 90s, and the computer I was on was black and white. It was a computer my sister had acquired from a neighbor. The menu system was like all text, 3 menus side by side that dropped down and expanded to other stuff. Had a word processor, spreadsheet, all that. 5 1/4 disk drive in it. Oh, and it definitely was Nightmare on Elm Street too. Never saw any side-scroll, but the top-down? Exploring the neighborhood? Yes, I remember that.
Edit: I do remember Freddy walking around the town, but the movement was such that literally the whole screen moved with him, so it looked choppy and the sprite wasn't animated to more than two frames. Never saw him transform into anything, or take a single life though. Town was medium size, and I don't remember figuring out how to enter a building or do anything useful in it. It was sort of maze-like, roads that came in front of and behind buildings, buildings arranged so that one had to decide on a proper route to get to certain points. I'm afraid it's a bit foggy, it has been some time though.
I *just* watched that episode and now this released 20 min ago. I'm already a paranoid schizophrenic, I don't need this.
Stay strong, dude.
That little guy on the bottom-right makes every Whang video worth it. I remember Justin saying: "this is my new favorite thing now" and linking the raw version of the video back in the days when I used Twitter.
Sweet shirt!
I have a feeling that you might have been at those Queens Elks Lodge shows - those were amazing times. I remember New Jack standing outside the front entrance, above the entry line, and I could see how scarred his forehead was from blading himself. I got to see Muffin Ass and Amish Roadkill there, too.
Keep up the great work!
Yo Whang, can I put you in a (NOT FOR PROFIT) game with Internet Historian, Ordinary Things, and SumitoMedia as a cameo/easter egg? It's a real thing thats happening and we have a crew making it.
If not it's cool, but I think everyone would love you being a secret boss in an RPG.
Yeah
Is it Barkley 3?
@@dr.skinnypenis2078 it's not Barkley 3, lmfao. But GOD, what if it was. Although the proof of concept was indeed made on RPG Maker! We've switched to Unity though because even though you can make some cool stuff on it, it is not made for a team of people to use.
This is freaking awesome that you do these videos on old games
"And here's where today's SPONSAH, Honey, comes in"
Just can't take that Queens accent out of you, huh? Love it.
My Guess was that
-Rough Concept images
-A Rough Demo, Testing mechanics
-Scraped original idea, Goes with the current game
Also nintendo won't ever allow a game that let you play as Freddy
@@Puerco-Potter Yeah, Probably half way through dev Nintendo was like "Hey.... Wtf"
I almost missed this because I thought it was just a reupload, but then I was like "wait why reupload, there was nothing wrong the first time"
I'm an NES collector myself. The issue comes down for some prototype collectors that they're afraid the prototype will devalue once its been "dumped," the term for having its ROM image copied from the prototype board. Some have their prototypes dumped to protect the ROM because bit rot can begin to occur after 25 or so years.
The other issue comes down to who do you trust. Some collectors have a wide circle of fellow collectors they can partner with to get what they need done. Others, such as myself, prefer to keep what I have for the most part private.
I do own 3 prototypes carts, two undumped and one dumped. The dumped one is identical to the retail release. The other two have sat in my collection for a few years now and I've made efforts to get them dumped. Seeing as I don't know any collectors with the ability to dump them for me, I'm hesitant to send them anywhere out of fear of theft or getting lost in the mail.
There's a lot more to consider than just "getting it out there to the people."
Has anyone asked the people that worked on the game that transpired, or is it not possible/no one remembers?
Mario literally pronounces his own name multiple times throughout history and he never sais it in a boston accent LOL ill never understand why people think it's pronounced like this 5:48
To be fair, Justin's mentioned growing up with pre-Nintendo 64 consoles, so he probably started pronouncing it that way and never stopped.
It's a New York accent
2:09 The cutting room floor!! fuck yeah I know it very well, and I love it, so much useful info and such a well designed website, one of my favorites out there
I think another important thing about this is Freddy's snake tail.
One thing the NES does not like is long horizontal stretches of sprites. it can only render 8 per line and that snake form looks like it takes up at least five horizontally.
Would experienced NES developers like Rare really design a form like that knowing full well it would force horrible flicker?
I know it could just be a momentary transition animation but still.
The combination of colored lights in your room makes for very weird light effects on your face. Once you notice it, you can't unsee it, and it drives me crazy
I actually really respect the fact that you came back to fix your mistake without covering the tracks of the fact that a mistake was made in the first place.
"altough it seems strange to me that the game would be in that stage and they spend money on advertisement" well, seems like he never heard about the story of doom from 3do
There was a time when I wouldn’t even rent a game with a rainbow on the box. Turns out I was more or less right every time.
last time I was this early, three people were disappointed in me
Hahaha. So you were a premature unexpected first born? Lolz
Make that 4
Are you okay?
Is that fewer than usual?
@@brandond313 it is
Im gonna say it existed in some capacity even if its lost forever just because i want to believe 😭
Lost media can be so frustrating.
I love the pixelart screens in your room
Was hoping for a part 2 on this one.
Thanks, Whang!
I was so confused when I saw this thumbnail. Thx for the follow up
I dont really understand the collector thing. I get they dont want to depreciate their collection of rare stuff by having it dumped... but when it's so niche that no ones knows it exists and you're just going to keep it secretly locked away, that's just wierd right?
It's really just a hoarder thing. Some people get weird, that's all I can say.
lol is this the same Armageddon Potato that has a store in Sacramento? Shout out to him, met up with him a couple times, had some good conversations about vintage games. Great guy!
Hey, thanks man! Hope to see you again sometime!
I remembered this happening with the Karate Champ game for NES. There was a level where you fought a bull on the box art but after hundreds of hours of gameplay i never got the bullfight stage...
Can't believe this was ever an issue. I have old catalogs from the 80s with all kinds of fake screenshots for games that actually came out. Some were even already released... like they just paid someone to make an image since they couldn't get an official one.
You know what would be awesome?
A Freddy VS Jason multiplayer vertical scrolling dungeon crawler game (with 2D platforming and puzzle sequences as in Goonies 2), where you are the prey and gotta bait one villain to meet the other in hope they mutually destroy each other. You gotta fetch objects to get Dream Mana (or challenge Jason or Freddy to a difficult duel to farm some). It allows you bypass obstacles, locked areas or just keep away the killers with weapons or superpowers. The more DM you have, the less conspicuous you are, which forces you to spend it conservatively.
The winner just happens to be the one waking up first. A score in red font would display at the upper left, adding up every time you get slain. The lower it is, the more it proves how good you are at the game.
The difference between the 2 kid sprites could also come from being another part of the walking animation.
Grats on the 800k subs my guy
He's gonna be huge one day!
My daughter really loves those 4 animated screens with the different games in your background, specifically the one with among us animation. Where did you find those?
I agree with you on that yes, these screenshots are mock-ups, but that doesn't disprove the existence of the prototype. It could be out there...somewhere, it just probably doesn't look a thing like the screenshots.
I used to make sprite comics and I for one am convinced this is a mock-up.
Sprite art for games and sprite art for art is extremely different and specifically made as such.
This looks like it was rendered for promo material.
I just noticed those cool digital frame things hanging to the right there. Those are great, man! I need to see about getting a few of those.
I love those animated picture frames in the back.
Is it possible that the weird inconsistencies with sprites could be because the screenshots came from a development kit build? Like, one that wasn’t scaled back to run well on the NES
Maybe try the social media accounts of some of the former Rare staff from that time? They would be the mostly likely to know if the "play as Freddy" version of the game was ever playable or if it was just an idea they had on the drawing board.
How does Whang exit his room? Behind him is the bed and assumedly his desk is in front of him. Where does the door fit in?
He's stuck in the Whang Zone, simple. There is no leaving.
Omg u brought back so many memories and nostalgia. Thank you so much man .
8:18 I'm surprised you didn't have an info card pop up with a link to your "Lost Resident Evil 2" video, considering what you're talking about here.
if the dot is in the same place, its a dead pixel on the TV, "back in the day" you couldn't just take screenshots of things, you had to take an actual picture with an actual camera of the thing on your screen, and its before the day of digital cameras really, but digital monitors, were a thing back then. they were big, expensive, and usually in the workplace, but they did exist.
A lot of publishers at the time wouldn't have a working build of the game by the time they started running ads, so they'd simply create mockups using DPaint or something.
as someone who has used photoshop a lot too draw,. Jpeg compression can account for a lot of distortion and pixels being off by one or two pixels. making the same sprite look slightly different. Jpeg compression can also add random specs too the ground.
iirc there wasn't a screen capture thing for these magazines they would literally take pics of a TV screen, so the white speck could be on the screen or the screens scanlines/pixels and interact with the camera's sensor interacting with the was sprites look and making the ground pattern look more random
Where can I buy those pixelated animated picture frames?
Thank you, Armageddon Potato. Partially for sharing the information, but mostly just for being named 'Armageddon Potato", which kinda rocks.
Just a thought regarding the dirt graphics. If you were to make 4 or 5 square assets that had varied divots/holes in them, each one could exist rotated in 4 positions and mirrored in 4 positions, assuming we have 5 tiles that can then exist in 8 potential positions, leaving a total of 40 potential iterations of dirt tiles from 5 asset blocks. Considering the area the dirt covers, if you were to randomly fill the field with these 5 tiles in random orientations, it would be extremely hard to find the pattern. Maybe that is why it ALMOST looks like a pattern, but it also doesn't.
I can see the re cap of the re cap of the original video already... I'm ready for it.
There’s a possibility they’re real, the unreleased power glove games have footage with extremely good graphics for the systems hardware. Perhaps some prototypes made on the engine were downscaled before release
When I was five my family drove to Pennsylvania to visit some extended family where I stayed a night or two at an aunt's house. One of the main memories that stuck with me was watching my cousin play a Nightmare on Elm st game but I suppose it could have been a Jason game. I just know it was based off a popular horror film so naturally I was terrified....
When I saw the title I thought you were gonna say the pages were photoshopped or something, but the screenshots being mockups and not from a finished prototype does make a lot of sense
Finally chilled out with the outro music I see
The detective work on this vid is awesome!
I’m so surprised you haven’t covered the game harvester. Please!!
Later games tended to have much more room for CHR-ROM data than SMB did, because they used more advanced mappers. It's possible that several metatiles were used to combine the same tiles of dots into several different arrangements, making the ground look a bit more random and less repetitive than in some other games. (Note that there are still patterns and repeating dots.) A lot of the minor variations, like differences in sizes, alignments, broader lines, etc., could be attributed to the fuzziness and the lower-quality printed image on the poster. Remember that we're probably looking at a CRT TV screen shot with a 35mm camera, not exactly the most pixel-perfect way to capture an image. Also, (assuming it's not a mock-up) I suspect that the yellow lights would've been produced using sprites instead of background tiles, in which case the sprites could have been shifted slightly one way or the other without taking up additional CHR-ROM space. None of this is to say it's definitely not a mock-up, just that the evidence here is not conclusive.
Props on the ECW t shirt
That doggo pillow in the background reminds me of The Grate Debate.
What's more likely is that the original prototype played almost exactly like the retail game, but had you controlling Freddy and maybe different art for each kid and bad guy in the game. Then when the opportunity to swap plot happened, they just swapped a bunch of the assets in the game and maybe that took a bit longer than expected.
Remember though, the screenshots are not just fakes, they're obvious fakes that were probably made in an art tool, and don't even seem to contain any real game assets. This points to the game simply not existing; the only other possibility is that it does exist but doesn't look like the screenshots, and there is literally no evidence for this being the case.
@@pentelegomenon1175 You're missing the point of my comment, I'm not talking about the prototype as presented in those fake photos, what I'm talking about is the fact that for so long of the announcement of this game they kept the plot the same as you controlling Freddy up until the game was pretty much released. There is no way that they built from the ground up the game that got released in the amount of time when they switched from Freddy being the vocal point to you playing as one of the teenagers in springwood. so it probably happened was they were making the game that got released, but Freddy was the playable character up until a certain point before release.
Dude what are those video picture frame thigns on your wardrobe I want them!