It’s amazing to see just how many games were never known to the general public only for someone who worked on a project to randomly release a video of said title. Case in point for this piece being a Zorro title that was in development for the Super Nintendo.
This was discovered after an ex-Irem employee uploaded a gameplay video to YouTube back in March 2021 only for the video to be quickly removed. This didn’t stop someone from downloading it and uploading it again to their own page.
Later on a YouTuber going by Evil Pixel did some digging they were able to discover that that the original uploader was former Irem employee Yoshinobu Oyama who would later go on to be the script writer to Radiata Stories and producer of Chromehounds.
Evil Pixel later conducted an interview with Oyama who revealed that this game was based on the early conceptualization of the 1998 movie Mask of Zorro and would have featured a play style very similar to the cult-classic Sunset Riders.
Despite these quotes that would make this game seem like it could have been a hit, Oyama revealed the game was ultimately cancelled in 1994 due to Irem cancelling their console division to focus on coin-op arcades.
Despite a playable ROM not being made available, we do know that Oyama does have a prototype copy of the game that was originally burned to a cartridge by one of its original programmers, but said there really wasn’t a way to make another copy.
