business in the front, spiders in the back

Since wrapping up restoration work on Witch Machine back in 2019, the Video Memories Project's inbox has been full of messages from people offering to send us builds of unreleased Game Boy games on which they once worked.

While we can't respond to every message we receive — and we don't have the resources to restore every build we're offered — a team member will always reach out to you if we're interested in your unreleased game build. As an apology for our radio silence over the past year, we wanted to take this opportunity to finally release a game that we've been working hard to restore!

FALLSTAR was developed by "Team Slime," a group of friends trying to make an arcade shooter that would outshine the very basic ports of big-name arcade titles like Space Invaders and Galaga, which dominated the genre on the Game Boy.

Ultimately, the game's publisher annulled their contract. A company representative explained that they had no interest in challenging industry titans behind the games that Team Slime wanted FALLSTAR to take on. Discouraged from putting more time, effort, and money into the game, the friends cut their losses, halting work on FALLSTAR in the final months of its development and dissolving Team Slime as a corporate entity. There has been plenty of innovation in the handheld arcade shooter space in the three decades since the Game Boy was released, but our team members keep going back to FALLSTAR. Sometimes it's to try different crew member abilities; other times, it's to take down the bosses that punctuate the game's intelligently generated stages.

Having played the game so much ourselves, we felt compelled to restore and release FALLSTAR for everyone else to enjoy, too!

About two and a half years ago I had a dream where I was in a fancy restaurant and my waiters - who I recognized as prominent Let’s Players - sang a version of this song to me. To this day, it is the only song that has ever come to me in a dream, and I’m glad to finally be doing something with it.

Planned for release in October 1996, Witch Machine was an experiment in pushing the boundaries of what could be done on the Nintendo Game Boy.

Concerns from investors over the project’s viability and rumors of mismanagement by team leaders made development uniquely troubled… that is, until word of “troubling content” began to circulate months before launch, spelling the end for the game and the company behind it.

Higher ups at GodHead Interactive pulled the plug on the project weeks after the rumors surfaced and, facing bankruptcy, closed their doors on June 6, 1996.

The final build of the game never made it to release, and the few test cartridges auctioned off during the company’s liquidation became relics, finding homes in private collections, unable to be played in their corrupted state.

Last year, the Video Memories Project was gifted a GodHead dev kit, found by a fan in an old storage unit who hoped they could salvage its contents. The patch contained within, when applied to a development cartridge, returned the game to a playable state.

Now, nearly 25 years after its cancellation, the world is able to experience what could have easily been a piece of gaming obscura, lost to the ages.

Please enjoy Witch Machine, a rediscovered piece of horror game history.