You’re Gonna Love This: Die Hard 64 (1999)

After Die Hard Trilogy and GoldenEye 64 were big successes back in the 1990s, plans went ahead to develop a Die Hard game for the Nintendo 64.  Titled Die Hard 64, there were only rumors of its existence and nothing more.  Now an Assembler Games forum member has evidently found the thing in its incomplete form.

The guys over at Retro Collect reached out to the forum member and here is what he had to say:

“The game is far from complete, and is split into three roms. Each rom has got about 8 levels and around 3 of them are playable in each rom (the rest are test levels, or unfinished levels with no enemies at all). The levels playable include the prison riot, the hospital, LA street, the police department. The maps are quite big, and fairly impressive for the Nintendo 64; for instance in the LA street level you have few streets and you can go inside some buildings, but you dont have any pedestrians or cars running in the street. It feels a bit empty, but this is a very early game. All cutscenes are missing and beside the “yippee ki yay!” and “that must hurt” voiced by Bruce Willis, there is no dialogue at all. Even in the most completed level you have a lot of funny glitches. It was really a work in progress – and you can tell.

“Beside that you still have a lot here. You have few melee weapons – a knife, baseball bat, police stick, tazer, and your fist. Firearms I found include a hand gun, Uzi, M-16, a sort of automatic shotgun and a few other generic machine guns. What’s really cool is that you can dual wield weapons. In terms of gameplay, you can climb ladder, push buttons, jump, crouch, crawl on the ground, and you can also lean around corners. You have also some kind of unfinished ‘bullet time’ effect with the camera rotating around the bullet – a bit like Max Payne.

“The field of view is quite narrow but I guess thats standard in an N64 shooter, and the controls seem to be quite complicated to get used to. I guess I lost my skill with modern shooters’ auto aiming, but it was really hard to shoot the enemies!”

Even better, a video of it quietly made its way onto YouTube a few weeks back, which you can see below.  The game was supposedly to be set in a hospital, a prison and on the streets of Los Angeles.  Bit Studios, the developers, eventually moved to the Playstation 2 where they released Die Hard: Vendetta.

Don’t expect to play ’64’ on a rom though, it’s still on the developer’s cartridge.