1992’s Super Star Wars, one of the best Super Nintendo games not actually made by Nintendo, was—along with its sequels, Super Empire and Super Jedi—one of the defining exclusives of the SNES v Genesis era. Turns out, though, it was also in development at one point for Sega’s console.
The Cutting Room Floor and Hidden Palace have got hold of a copy of this cancelled Genesis version of the game, which is wild to see because as they point out, nobody ever thought, at the time or subsequently, that this was even a possibility. One of the main selling points of the Super Star Wars series was its use of Mode 7, a graphics gimmick that the Genesis simply couldn’t reproduce, so when the games never appeared on Sega’s console, we all just assumed that was why.
Nope! As you can see towards the end of this video, the game’s Death Star attack sequence, which was rendered in Mode 7 on SNES and is sadly not shown here (probably because it was never made/finished), is labelled as “First Person”, suggesting a switch in perspective was the team’s way of getting around the Genesis’ technical shortcomings.
You can see over 20 minutes of footage of the game in the vid below: