The Untold Story Behind Cancelled Wii Game “Project HAMMER”
Unseen 64 has blown the lid off one of Nintendo’s great mysteries, Project HAMMER — which would have been a gritty Wii launch title starring a cyborg rebelling against a post-apocalyptic world of evil robots, using his giant hammer to smash waves upon waves of them. It was to be created by Nintendo Software Technology, a Western division of the company, with cinema scenes by a third-party CGI company bookending the levels. The game was only shown in demo form during E3 2006 and never appeared again.
A lot of the earlier games for the Wii that involved heavy amounts of “waggle” controls haven’t aged well, and with Project HAMMER, the dev team could see the main issue right away. Not only was it impossible to replicate the swinging of the remote like a hammer one-to-one, but the entirety of the gameplay involved swinging said hammer. The repetitive motion grew tiring to the wrist quickly, but even if traditional controls had been used, there just wasn’t much meat to the concept. Enemies ran at you, and you hit them with your hammer. Move on, repeat.
The big issue came when the American studio and their Japanese bosses couldn’t come to a decision on what the real problem with the game was. NST insisted the gameplay was shallow and needed to be overhauled. Nintendo of Japan said the main issue was the environments, which needed to be more creative and expansive. The Western team obeyed these orders at first, but the game was still boring, and they still received the blame for not being allowed to fix the problem they saw as obvious.
Eventually the word came from Japan that Project HAMMER was to be given a graphical makeover into a casual-friendly, colorful game called Wii Smash. This version didn’t last very long because, again, the gameplay did not change. Key members of the creative team began to quit, and Nintendo Software Technology shrank to a pitiful shell of what it had been.
You can hear the full tragic story in Unseen64’s eleven-minute expose.