I find it fascinating to catalogue and discuss cancelled. Due to the amount of N64 games, I will be just looking at playable prototypes, the first of which is SimCopter 64, which was playable at E3 1997. It was planned to work as a standalone title, but would be compatible in some way with SimCity 2000, SimCity 64 and Mario Artist (all ended up being Japan-only games), although none of that was ever integrated.

In this prototype, you fly around as you please and can help sort out emergencies such as traffic jams and speeding cars (the full game would have had more, like the PC version). These are solved by hovering your spotlight on the cars and pressing a “shout” button. You get money for completing these tasks (there’s a sound effect but no HUD display).

You can also get out of the helicopter and walk around. In both flight and on the ground, none of the buildings have collision, so you go straight through them. The city looks nice, but draw distance is very low. It’s very likely that this was adapted into the free roam aspect of SimCity 64, which was from a first person view.

Footage from a later build has been see, but this is just a few seconds of footage and the build itself hasn’t been shared. This version has some text explaining what to do, a HUD showing health and money and has collisions.

SimCopter 64 is an impressive early demo of a 3D city on the N64, but I don’t think it would have performed well on the platform.

Fun

The PC version of the game received mixed reviews in its appearance earlier this year, but the Japanese developers promise the 64-bit version will be veritably rejigged with 30 new pre-built cities.

N64 Magazine #5

Should it be finished?

SimCopter was released on PC with better integration and better graphics, so there’s no reason to see the finished version of this. That said, I would be much more interested in SimCity if minigames like this were part of the package.