Abandoned Game 40 Winks Coming To Nintendo 64 Nearly Two Decades After Intended Release

Crowdfunded indie games are often replete with inspiration from titles from the bygone reign of consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis. You'll notice that some of these funded projects, like Yooka-Laylee or Hyper Light Drifter, had stretch goals with mock cartridges for display purposes. It'd be a financial drain to figure out how to produce compatible software for old hardware, let alone impossible for the aforementioned titles to remotely run on it. However, Piko Interactive has taken up the former challenge by resurrecting canceled, unfinished games on their original platforms with the Game Boy Color, NES, and more. The latest in their pedigree comes with 40 Winks on the Nintendo 64, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter within 10 hours of launching.

Publisher GT Interactive originally oversaw Eurocom's development of the collect-a-thon platformer on the PlayStation in 1999. A Nintendo 64 version was planned, but the struggling publisher was acquired by Infogames and the port was subsequently canned. Piko Interactive's campaign to bring it back is currently four times over its original $20,000 threshold with three weeks to go at the time of this writing.

40 Winks begins with the resentment of a crotchety man who can't catch some shuteye. Out of spite, he turns creatures responsible for good dreams (Winks) into nightmarish versions (Hood-Winks) that give everyone nightmares. It's up to a brother and sister duo to save the Winks and navigate through a series of lucid, strange worlds. As per usual for classic platformers, there are plenty of minigames and gameplay gimmicks in the form of transformations. What makes this "new" version of the game special is a co-op mode that wasn't available on the PlayStation. You can keep track of the project's continued progress and stretch goals by clicking here. A Steam version of the game will also be released alongside the Nintendo 64's version around September.

[Source: Piko Interactive on Kickstarter]

 

Our Take
I've never heard of Piko Interactive, but I think it's admirable to renew games on their original platforms that have been lost to time. I've always wondered if there's a market for producing games on outdated hardware, which is interestingly similar to vinyl's comeback over the years. If 40 Winks is any indication, perhaps they're tapping into something that would interest an equally passionate niche audience.