Pokemon Pinball games appeared on the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, which likely led some fans to assume the spin-off series would become a regular on Nintendo handhelds. That proved not to be the case, as the series has not seen another game since 2003's Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire. However, we now know thanks to the Nintendo "gigaleak" that a new entry was planned for September 2006. The game would have featured Wi-Fi support, and been developed by "FUSE." This information was shared on ResetEra, and one poster surmised that the listed developer probably refers to Fuse Games Limited, the team responsible for Mario Pinball Land and Metroid Prime Pinball.

Based on the time frame, the game would have presumably been based on Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, but it's impossible to say. Diamond and Pearl ended up releasing in September 2006 in Japan and the following year in North America. Perhaps this new Pokemon Pinball would have come too close to Diamond and Pearl's release date, or the game was based on previous generations and would have been considered outdated by the time the new generation released. Either way, the game was sadly shelved.

In addition to Pokemon Pinball, other cancelled DS projects were also discovered thanks to the gigaleak. Apparently, Geist DS was planned. Presumably, it would have been a follow-up to the Nintendo GameCube game, and it would have had online play, as well. Gauntlet DS was also planned, based on the arcade classic. Last but not least, Magic the Gathering creator Richard Garfield and developer NIGHTLIGHT had apparently come up with a game called "PLUCKER," which would have been a strategy game that used figures, as opposed to cards.

While the gigaleak has given fans a lot of interesting information about Nintendo, it also leaves us with a lot of additional questions. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how far in development any of these games were. Nintendo has actually sat on nearly finished games in the past, like Star Fox 2, but there's just no telling if any of these games were similarly close to completion. For now, fans will just have to wonder about what could have been!

-Rhythm Tengoku is listed as ‘RIQ’ (full working title is known to be Rhythm IQ). Notes for the game say “The songs will be newly written for this game, so OK for the whole world”.
-Elite Beat Agents was once known as Super Sonic Agents.
-Pokemon Pinball is listed as a DS title, with Wi-Fi support. Developer is ‘FUSE’. Target release date was September 2006.
-Geist DS is listed. Had online play.
-Gauntlet DS.
-Some game called ‘PLUCKER’, developed by ‘NIGHTLIGHT’. Notes: ‘Proposal from Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering. A strategy game that replaces card games with figures’.
‘Digitylish DS’. there were plans to bring the series over to DS before DSiWare existed.
-Soma Bringer was once known as Angelic Soma, and included online play. The game was originally set to be complete in September 2006.
-Banjo and Conker being replaced by Dixie and Tiny in Diddy Kong Racing DS is something NCL specifically note.
-There was some consideration in having NoA and NoE localize and publish Contact (by Grasshopper Manufacture). The spreadsheet describes it as a “Mother-like”.
-They considered redoing the character designs for the North American localization of Magical Starsign.
-The notes on New Super Mario Bros. specially mentions “Plans to distribute additional data for new courses via Wi-Fi”. Also mentions reusing the minigames from Super Mario 64 DS.
-Digitylish DS had “two prototypes in progress”, and Skip were “considering other projects in parallel”. It was suggest that they “extend the prototype period by 6 months to explore a new business model”; possibly an early reference to to DSi Shop.
-At the point this document was made online play wasn’t actually locked in for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl; mentioned as a consideration.
-There were a lot of working titles and early names. Most are “franchise name” then DS or [number of installment]; Chibi-Robo DS, Jump Super Stars 2, Mario vs. Donkey Kong DS, Yoshi’s Island 2, Kirby DS, Burabura Donkey DS, etc. Some publicly known early titles were also in use here, like Detect Hacker (Project Hacker), Wish Room (Hotel Dusk) and Eternal Chronicle (Glory of Heracles). There’s also ‘Game Fortune Bag’ (Clubhouse Games) and Marionation Gear (Chosoju Mecha MG).

Posted: Jul 27, 2021 7:46 am
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/pokemon-pinball-nintendo-ds-cancelled-games-leak/