Many South Park fans fondly remember their time spent with the franchise's video game adaptations, but how many remember the South Park game that turned into a Mary Kate & Ashley title? South Park: The Stick of Truth and The Fractured but Hole may have resonated with fans and found commercial success, but the first attempt at a South Park game has a much more interesting story.
South Park is an animated comedy television series created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The series revolves around four young school children and their friends and family as they contend with the hilarious antics their sleepy mountain town gets up to. There have been several South Park games and even recent word that a new one is in development.
South Park's first handheld gaming outing was an ill-fated Game Boy Color title that never saw the light of day. The game's only major public appearance was in an issue of Nintendo Power, accompanied by a single screenshot of gameplay. The title was being developed by Acclaim Entertainment and was nearly ready to ship, but just before release, South Park's creators had a change of heart. Matt Stone and Trey Parker noticed that young players primarily owned Nintendo's handheld and felt it wasn't consistent with their mature audience. The game was never released, but prototype cartridges are in Matt and Trey's possession to commemorate the first South Park video game attempt.
Remarkably, the game lived on, as Acclaim would use the work they'd done on South Park as the basis for two games explicitly aimed at children. Acclaim first retrofitted the game's code to create the European published Maya the Bee & Her Friends. In North America, further tweaks would produce The New Adventures of Mary Kate & Ashley, a title tying in with the then massive Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen branding. Despite obvious differences, such as not featuring South Park characters like Stan or Cartman, the skeleton of the original game lived through its descendants. In either title, familiar elements from the South Park game can be seen, like platforming segments or the HUD.
Both Game Boy Color titles offered a relatively standard sidescrolling platformer experience for the time and platform. They didn't reinvent the wheel, but such was typical for franchise tie-in games. Taking that into considering, maybe it's for the best that South Park was canceled. The genre wouldn't have complimented the series, misdirecting the focus from the characters to puzzle-solving or platforming. And while South Park is not particularly well known for its visuals, the pulled-back, pixelized cast and town weren't all too flattering to the franchise.
The story comes to a close in 2018 when a ROM of the canceled South Park game was leaked online. After years of pondering what a Game Boy Color South Park game might look like, fans and players finally got a closer look at the series' first video game project. It wasn't suitable for the show's creators, but it was good enough to transform into two other shipped games. The Game Boy Color's South Park is renowned by no means, but it has one hell of an accompanying story.
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