MATT BOZON AND MIKE STRAGEY DISCUSS RISKY REVOLUTION, ITS CANCELLATION AND REVIVAL
How soon after the original Shantae did the GBA game go into production?
Matt: Some of the earliest design work began as early as November 2000, when we had our earliest dev kits and prototype hardware. Shantae for GBC was still in production at that time. So while me, Erin and Jimmy were busy wrapping up Shantae 1, Mike Stragey started to lay the groundwork for the new GBA tech.
What were the things you were hoping to achieve with the more powerful hardware?
Matt: I had a laundry list of features for the next generation of our handheld department, and those were all based on things you’d expect to see in 16-bit-era side-scrollers. Shantae Advance was the game intended to prototype all of these features. The way we took these early steps was to finish Shantae on GBC at the same time as we were building The Scorpion King, which was a proving ground for the Shantae GBA game’s core features. Those features were then brought back into the Shantae GBA game demo, which would go out to publishers. In this way, we were hoping to have a nice feature loop that would carry multiple years of WayForward GBA games!
Was the ability to move between the foreground and background inspired by the additional background layers that the GBA offered?
Matt: Yes, but also by early SNES games with similar ideas: Super Mario World, Super Castlevania IV, Super Metroid, Super Ghouls ’N Ghosts, Demon’s Crest and Zelda: A Link To The Past. These games all used various dual-layered gameplay or sorting tricks that we wanted to play with once the GBA came along. Those games, and the incredible Wario Land for Virtual Boy, inspired many of the dual-layered gameplay ideas.
How long did work on Shantae Advance continue, and how complete was it when work stopped?
Matt: We were in development from 2001- 2005, but production stopped twice, once when we’d exhausted all of the publishers we knew (somewhere around 2004), and again after one more attempt – sometime around when the Game Boy Micro was announced.
Shantae Advance looked like a strong game – why did it struggle to find a publisher?
Matt: The retail market was extremely challenging. It was tough during the GBC days, and became even more so during the GBA days. Before GBA launched, dev time and costs were expected to double or even quadruple, so teams had to grow much bi
