During the Nintendo Indie World Showcase earlier this week, WayForward's Erin and Matt Bozon showed up to debut the trailer for a new game in the Shantae series. But, it turns out, Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution is actually an old game in the Shantae series.

"In 2001, we started development on a Shantae sequel for Game Boy Advance," Matt Bozon said. "It was never completed, but we'd always hoped that, someday, we could go back and finish it."

Via Nintendo. 

"Now, more than 20 years later," Erin Bozon added, "we've brought the original development team back together to complete the lost Shantae game."

It's a cool idea, and the execution looks genuinely old-school. While many throwback games look "the way you remember" retro games looking, Risky Revolution straight-up looks like a GBA game, with colorful 16-bit sprites that could have believably run on the platform. The word "Advance" in the game's logo is even styled in the typeface as it appeared in on the handheld and its packaging back in the day. The biggest modern concessions are the high-definition character portraits that appear on screen during dialogue, but when Shantae is running, jumping, and turning into a variety of animals, it's a dead ringer for a game from the Bush era.

The Bozons don't get into why Risky Revolution was initially canceled during their brief presentation, but the narrators during the Showcase allude to a mechanic that allows Shantae to swap the background to the foreground in order to solve puzzles. If the game needed to store two versions of each level in memory at all times, it's easy to see how the idea could have been too big for GBA hardware. Especially given that WayForward had trouble getting financing for the sequel because the original game sold poorly, launching on Game Boy Color after the Game Boy Advance was already available.

Regardless of why the game was never completed, this story has me thinking about another release that got rebooted for Switch after biting the dust in an earlier era: Metroid Dread. Nintendo, like WayForward, had originally been developing the game for a handheld platform. Dread was initially in the works for the DS, but it ran into issues that the tech wasn't advanced enough to solve. Producer Yoshio Sakamoto wanted Samus to be stalked by an enemy throughout the entirety of the game, taking the SA-X stealth sequences from Metroid Fusion — in which Samus had to evade a menacing version of herself — and building an entire game around the concept. In the final game that was released on the Switch in 2021, this idea is realized with EMMI robots that frequently appear to pursue Samus through the map.

I'm fascinated by the long and winding road Dread took to get from being a frustrated idea to a full-featured final release. It's the kind of thing that can only happen when a studio holds onto talent for a long period of time. Though development was a joint effort between Nintendo EPD and Spanish developer Mercury Steam (which had previously developed Metroid: Samus Returns for 3DS) it's extremely unlikely the project would have gotten off the ground if Sakamoto had not still been working at Nintendo and interested in the idea decades later. We saw the same dynamic in action on a far grander scale with Final Fantasy VII Remake as many of the developers of the original game returned for a current-gen remix.

Risky Revolution is bringing the team back together in the same way. Erin Bozon created the character of Shantae all the way back in 1994, and Matt Bozon directed the original Game Boy Color game, and every game in the series since. That kind of long-running continuity is hard to come by in the games industry. I hope the game is great, but the behind-the-scenes story is so cool that, even if it isn't, I'm interested enough to make Risky Revolution my first foray into the Shantae series.

NEXT: What Is Going On With Indies At The Game Awards?