Unreleased: Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill - "New" Screenshots!

It's Election Day here in the US, so I'm going to push our Adventure of the Week back to Thursday, because I've actually found something videogame related to post about today.

Political satire is a rarity in the world of videogames, but back in 1993 Kaneko's US division planned to release Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill, a side-scrolling action game based on the official Clinton family pet.  The game was finished ready for release on the Super NES and Sega Genesis, and magazine ads and reviews were running.  But the game never made it to store shelves after Kaneko Japan decided to close its Western division, and in an even more unusual twist, no physical prototype or ROM image of the game has yet surfaced as I write this in November 2009.

So Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill remains one of those mysterious unreleased titles - we know enough about it to guess that it was no masterpiece, but as it got well beyond the concept stage it has become a tantalizing "lost game" from the 16-bit era.  It reportedly featured political figures like Ross Perot, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush as bosses, which would have been entertaining to see in action.

Anyway, a number of ads, screenshots and box art scans have surfaced over the years, but I didn't find these specific images anywhere else on the Web.  These images are scanned from a review published in the July 1994 issue of GamePro magazine.

This screen reveals a bit of educational gameplay that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.

 

And this one makes it clear that Socks was not going to be much competition for Bubsy, Spike McFang, Aero the Acrobat, or any of the other furry platforming hopefuls that invaded the market in Sonic the Hedgehog's wake.

But the game did exist, and hopefully it will be discovered someday.