Deleted version of Nintendo 64 Tomb Raider playable! [VIDEO]

It's a first-person action puzzle game starring an attractive, polygonal lady… and this time it's not Lara Croft, so we can definitely say that the Tomb Raider version has made its way to the audience.

In the late 1990s, after seeing the success of Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark, the studio began working on a game in which the heroine played and fought. Bits Studios' game was called Riqa and was shown off at E3 1999. It never got past the prototype stage, so it's no wonder it was delayed several times and eventually cancelled. However, the story does not end here..

Ten Shu, one of Riqa's developers, has published ROMs of several versions of their other unfinished game, Die Hard 64, which means it can be emulated as well. Now, in Riqa's case, he documented the state the game was in during development. Camouflage pants, dodging lasers, climbing ladders, and shooting a few bad guys. The latter looks like Tomb Raider, just with a bit more anime flair. Our heroine even passes by an unused mechanism.

We can already access the game on the Internet Archive (and Nintendo can't complain about this: the game hasn't been officially published, so they have no say in this!) If you have an EverDrive 64, it can also be played (so it will also work on a console with this cartridge). Ten Shu also shows how to emulate it on PC (you don't really need a particularly modern PC for this; it's not on PS3 level). Ten Shu worked at Bits Studios from 1997 to 2001. He worked on many unreleased N64 games, and after a few years a large number of them became GameCube and PS2 titles.

There's just one small advantage: you need two controllers. The second controller can be used to bring up the menu and choose a track. The four versions in the rar file are the last versions before deletion; The team was then transferred to Die Hard 64 and Thieveworld respectively. Rogue Ops was born from the latter in 2003. The studio also worked on Die Hard: Vendetta and Constantine (film to game), the latter of which was released in 2005 for PC.

source: PCGamer, Internet Archive