Look beyond classic Capcom franchises like Mega Man, Street Fighter, and Resident Evil and you'll find Strider, the adventures of heroic ninja Strider Hiryu and his quest to defeat Grandmaster Meio and his horrible Third Moon space station. While the game was ported to home consoles in the late 1980s and early 1990s with mixed results, fans still look to the original arcade game that started it all as the best of the series. Could any home version possibly hope to eclipse the arcade experience? What 16-bit generation home console could contain the awesome power of Strider? Capcom tried to bring Strider to the next iteration of the TurboGrafx-16, the SuperGrafx, but in the end the project just wasn't meant to be. Explore the lost Strider adventure in this extensive article from The Light Sword Cypher Mainframe.
Someone wrote in to the January 1991 issue of [Electronic Gaming Monthly] and inquired about Striderfor the SGX, having caught wind of the planned port. EGM answered his questions, claiming that they'd actually played the game while on a trip to Japan the previous September.
Whether they actually did or not is anybody's guess. It's unlikely that the port was in any kind of playable form, having just been announced. EGM's article included two screenshots purporting to be from the SGX version, one of which would survive for years as the only tangible proof this port was ever in production. Astute readers will note, however, that these shots are two of the screens from PC Engine Fan, and EGM merely repeated what they had said.
It's a shame that this version of Strider never reached stores. The SuperGrafx could have used a sixth game in its library.
(via Games That Weren't)
