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Tech

How This Unfinished, Unpublished Super Nintendo Game Appeared on Steam

‘Dorke and Ymp’ couldn’t find a publisher in the 90s, but did much better in 2016.
Dude hates rabbits. Credit: Piko Interactive

Games get delayed all the time, but Dorke and Ymp is something of an exception. Orginally developed for the Super Nintendo but never released, the 2D platformer is now available on Steam after one company brought the Swedish project back from the dead.

In the early 90s, a three-person team in Stockholm called Norse developed a fantasy platformer called Dorke and Ymp. It follows the adventures of a hooded goblin in a onesie questing through a gamut of environments with a flying demon friend in tow. Norse created the game without a license from Nintendo or official developer kits, using Amiga computers instead. When it sought a publisher to give the game a commercial release it struggled to no avail. Norse disbanded without a game to its name.

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Despite not having a publisher, it seems Dorke and Ymp got some local publicity. Three years ago, Eli Galindo of Piko Interactive saw a glimpse of the game in a scan of a Swedish game magazine. Because he's in the business of publishing lost, Super Nintendo vaporware, Galindo found the original creators online and struck a deal to release Dorke and Ymp with replica cartridges.

While the game was apparently nearly finished when it was cancelled, the files Galindo and the Norse creators were able to recover were from earlier in its creation and far from completion. Galindo gave the project a rain check until 2014, when Norse member Jim Studt passed away. "I felt like I needed to finish his game in his honor," Galindo told me in an email.

Putting around 300 hours into completing the game, the presumed-dead Super Nintendo game is now available online.

"I'm personally very, very attracted to unreleased games," said Galindo. "They are intriguing, and just give me a feeling of 'what could have been.' You can say I am addicted."