Ridge Racer
Image: Namco

After a week of looking ahead to Switch 2, it's strange to think about 'Switch 1' again, but online chatter about the leaked contents of the OG console's dev kit has got us musing on the games that never came to fruition.

It all stems from a recent post on the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours Reddit forum, where user capitalggamer1 shared a bunch of titles that can supposedly be found in the Switch dev kit, including dev builds for an unreleased Ridge Racer game, a new Retro Studios project, a 'LEGO Civilization' and debug builds for Splatoon 2 and ARMS.

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The post doesn't specifically state where the information was sourced from (so take things with a pinch of salt here), though it does link to two screenshots and some rudimentary gameplay footage via Switch emulator Ryujinx claimed to be from Retro Studio's 'Project Harmony'.

By the looks of things, the Retro project was a 3D platformer, with magic creature summoning as its central gameplay concept. It's a very early look — we assume this is what Retro was working on before it was whisked off to Metroid Prime land — but it's a neat little peek at a game that never was, nonetheless.

Fortunately, there's a little more meat on the Ridge Racer bone, with more complete-looking gameplay footage of the unreleased title shared to Twitter by user @resethepicture. The game was apparently developed by Bandai Namco in Unreal Engine 4 back in early 2017, and the footage certainly looks legitimate enough to be the real deal.

While we never got our hands on the 'new' Ridge Racer, HAMSTER announced last week that an Arcade Archives release of the original PS1 title would be speeding onto Switch 2 for its 5th June launch date. Hey, it's the little victories.

What do you make of these titles that never came to be? Let us know in the comments.

[source reddit.com, via x.com]