Nintendo Dream Catcher



"Nintendo Dream Catcher" refers to a set of map editing and scripting tools that were supposed to make modding Nintendo 64 games easy and accessible for casual players. It is unknown which one of Nintendo's developer teams was responsible for it and its existence has been uncovered only recently by independent journalists who got their hands on a supposed prototype.

The software was supposedly planned to release on its own cartridge for around 100.000 Japanese Yen. The "prototype" package is said to have included a special Massive Memory Card with 64 megabytes of storage, that when successfully connected to the controller would trigger the game that's currently being played to display a message, offering the player to dump the assets of said game. After the user agreed, the game would freeze and a loading screen would appear while the file names of the assets would be displayed one after another to communicate progress to the user.

After this process another message would appear, asking the player to insert the "Dreamer Cartridge" and to not turn the console off under any circumstances. After following the instructions the player would be greeted with the Nintendo Dream Catcher interface, which is reported to look very organized and modern. A message would then tell the user that they now have access to all the assets of the previously dumped game and to: "have fun with them :)".

As mentioned before, the interface of the software appears to be very thought out and reminiscent of modern software, while also running surprisingly well. One of the journalists who claimed to possess the "prototype" went on to say that its workflow and capabilities reminded them of earlier versions of Godot, which made them believe it to not be a prototype after all, despite the label they reported to be on the cartridge claiming otherwise. As photographs of it show, the cartridge also doesn't resemble the cartridges that Nintendo used for prototypes, seemingly proving their suspicion.

From notes that were included in the package it can be inferred that the Nintendo Dream Catcher was also supposed to have Stop N' Swap functionalities, details on what kind of features were planned have not been uncovered yet however.

According to former mentioned group of journalists the Nintendo Dream Catcher project has been cancelled in the year 1995, without anyone outside of Nintendo ever knowing of its existence until 2022. It has been theorized that the development has in fact not been cancelled, but instead merely shifted its focus towards somehow implementing the software into the AI, whose development period overlapped with the one of the Nintendo Dream Catcher.

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