Three More Carts In: Star Wars Episode I: Racer, Tigger’s Honey Hunt, and Chopper Attack

This week’s N64 Project pickups add three more carts to the shelf: Star Wars Episode I: Racer, Tigger’s Honey Hunt, and Chopper Attack. None of them look like much loose in a drawer. Each one hides a stranger production story than its price tag suggests. One is a rushed movie tie-in. Another is a helicopter shooter that got cut down before release. A short video with gameplay from all three is coming soon.

Star Wars Episode I: Racer

LucasArts developed and published Racer. The N64 version launched on May 18, 1999, timed to ride the wave of Phantom Menace hype. The team started building the game from concept art and specs for the podracing sequence. The film hadn’t even locked down how the vehicles worked yet. So LucasArts and the film’s effects team at ILM ended up shaping some of those details together as production went. Lead designer Jon Knoles later summed up the studio’s real design philosophy in blunter terms than any marketing copy: ‘Maybe we can’t make a great racing game, but we can make an excellent toy.’ The pod physics never aimed for realism. Opponents stick to a fixed path. They rubber-band toward you to keep the race close, and the whole system was tuned purely to feel fast and dangerous, not to simulate anything real.

A few smaller details stuck around from development too. LucasArts originally planned to call the game Star Wars Episode I: Podracer. They changed the name after learning Ubisoft already had a racing game called POD. There’s also a two-controller cheat. It lets you steer using both control sticks as separate podracer engines, more fun than it has any right to be.

Tigger’s Honey Hunt

French studio Doki Denki developed Tigger’s Honey Hunt for PlayStation, and Disney Interactive published it in North America through NewKidCo. The N64 version wasn’t an afterthought so much as a sprint. Rivage Games handled that port while working inside the same building as the PlayStation team. It finished the job in about four months. Nintendo turned the approval around in about four weeks after submission, which is fast even by N64 third-party standards.

The rush makes more sense once you know why. The whole project needed to tie into The Tigger Movie. That movie had already hit theaters that February. The N64 version shipped October 27, 2000 in North America. That gave the two platforms only about nine months from start to finish combined. Movie-tie-in deadlines like that were common for licensed N64 games. It shows in how many of them exist mostly to hit a release window rather than to experiment.

Chopper Attack

Chopper Attack, known as Wild Choppers in Japan, was developed by SETA Corporation. Midway published it in North America, and GT Interactive handled Europe. It shipped in Japan in 1997 and North America in 1998. The game puts players in a helicopter across a series of time-pressured missions. Objectives include bombing enemy bases, escorting Air Force One through hostile territory, and rescuing prisoners of war. Different helicopters and loadouts let you replay missions differently.

Nintendo showed it at the Shoshinkai expo in November 1996 with a two-player split-screen mode built in. That feature never made the final cartridge. Reviews were mixed at the time, with a GameRankings aggregate around 54%. Still, it’s a solid example of the glut of licensed-adjacent military action games N64 got in its early years.

This Round of N64 Project Pickups

Three different games, three different kinds of rushed. One was built around a movie that hadn’t finished deciding what its own vehicles looked like. Another had to hit a tight movie-tie-in deadline on a four-month N64 port. The third got scaled back from its original pitch before it shipped. That wraps up this round of N64 Project pickups: 32 down, 264 to go. Full running list with prices is on the tracker page, and if you missed the last haul, four more carts came in back in July.