Unreleased Nintendo 64 Game ‘Riqa’ Discovered

Back in the late 1990s, while Lara Croft was happily raiding tombs on pretty much every platform you could shake a stick at (even the maligned N-Gage got a port of Tomb Raider), Nintendo fans could have been forgiven for feeling a little left out. Sure, Nintendo 64 owners got to plunder hidden treasure in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, but a true rival to Miss Croft’s exploits was conspicuous by its absence on Nintendo’s powerful hardware. In an attempt to give gamers an equivalent adventure, Nintendo looked to a new heroine and teased shots of a 3D action adventure game with a female lead known as ‘Riqa.‘

Sadly, very little was ever seen of this game outside of a few rolling demos and fuzzy screenshots in magazines of the era, and after brief rumours that the game had been moved to Gamecube, Riqa vanished without a trace. It appears that the game was actually further into development than ever previously known however, and a user known as 10ahu from the Assembler forums has recently uploaded footage of Riqa in playable form.

Featuring some great character animation and varied level designs, as well as some intense gunplay, Riqa looks like it could well have been a hit on the Nintendo 64 – a console not really renowned for its third person shooters. Judging from the 15 minute video 10ahu has uploaded to YouTube (and in a similar fashion to the recently discovered Rev Limit), Riqa looks like it is running on actual N64 hardware and represents yet another game being unearthed that many thought would never be seen again.