Mickey's Playtown Adventure: A Day Of Discovery!

This is a prototype of the unreleased game, Mickey's Playtown Adventure: A Day Of Discovery. By: Evan G Last updated: February 1, 2019

A long time ago when I was searching for information on this game, I sent a message to artist Eric Browning about it, and he responded.:

Mickey never saw the light of day. It was complete, I can't remember what happened. I tried animating Mickey- but Disney does not mess around with that guy and I simply am not trained as an animator. We sent it to Little Gangsters in L.A, an animation house Disney worked with. They did amazing animation- I was humbled by that.

I got a ROM of Mickey, wow, I've come a long way. Pretty neat to see it, I remember every little pixel. The animation isn't as good as I remember, partly due to my inexperience and in large part because I think the programmer was forced to remove frames.

After playing the game, I really think that Mr. Browning is selling his work short - the animation and graphics in this game are amazing for a SNES game. It is sort of set up like a point-and-click game. For instance, if you touch an empty flower pot, flowers bloom. The game might be a bit text heavy for the intended child friendly audience, which I assume might have been one of the reasons for it not being released. Some of the puzzles, notably the safe vault challenge, also have very frustrating controls. The game itself looks like it is pretty much complete, but it isn't really something that would appeal to the hardcore SNES fan.

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering this game was geared towards young children, this game was not heavily featured in game magazines. The game was advanced enough that there is box art for it.

Box art, from Half.com

The ROM image that is out there comes from a scene release by the group Napalm, who leaked it on January 25, 1995. The checksum is correct in the leaked version. There really isn't any reason to believe the dump is hacked.

  _____                                          _ __________          ______
 \\_   \       _ __________ _____________ _______   _       /         /    _//
   /    \_________        / \_     _     \      /   /      / ________/     \
  /      \      _/   ___  \  /     /     / ___  \  /      /__\_     /   _   \
 /        \     \    \     \/     ______/  \     \/      /    /   _    /     \
/    _     \     \    \    /      /  /      \    /     _/    /     \  /       \
\     \     \_    \   /  _/      /  /       /    \          /       \/        /
 \\____\          /__/   \______/  /_______/      \\________\\______/        /
        \        /   \_________ _          \_________ _            \        /mf
         \      /                                                   \      /
<-- [ GaMe\iNFo/MaTioN ] ---------------------------- [ GaMe iNFoRMaT\oN ]/-->
           \  /                                                       \  /
            \/        TITLE    : MICKEY'S PLAYTOWN ADVENTURE           \/
                      COMPANY  : Visual Concepts
                      GAMEINFO : SNES/FIG/8M
                      DATE     : 01/25/95

I received an email back in early January 2013 from Bob Prater, who owned a prototype of the game. He told me that it was going to be shown on a TV show called “The Home Tech Show”, but the show was cancelled before it aired. The prototype has a date of September 9, 1994, which is quite a bit before the scene release. Whether or not this is an earlier version of the game, it is hard to know. The title screen, which he took a picture of, is identical to the leaked prototype. Mr. Prater sold the game on Ebay shortly afterwards. Here is the text from the auction:

I was doing some cleaning in a cabinet on New Year's Day and found a box of games that were sent to me back in the mid-nineties by video game developers. I produced a show called “The Home Tech Show” which never reached the air. But I still got stuff. Included in the box was the prototype for the SNES game "Mickey's Playtime Adventure: A Day of Discovery," from the folks at Disney. This particular game was never released.

And at least one website shows that no prototypes are known to exist, although I'm fairly certain there's another one floating around somewhere.

Well, here it is! The game was sent to me by Hi Tech Entertainment in September, 1994. It's been plugged into a Super Nintendo console and fires right up. You can see the title screen in the pictures above. Be sure to take a look at our other auctions. We also have an unreleased SNES prototype for the 1994 game, "Bobby's World" (based on the Howie Mandel series) going up for sale. Any questions? Just ask! And thanks for taking a look at our auction!

Prototype sent to The Home Tech Show

Another prototype was sold by gamezsquare in May 2012. The image from the auction is below.

Prototype sold by gamezsquare

Here are some screenshots of the game.

Title screen	Cake

Mickey getting out of bed	Mickey in the kitchen

Pluto is happy with his bone.	Touch the pot and flowers bloom!

Making a pie with Minnie.	Battle against the robber spiders.

Scrooge McDuck is upset even after retrieving his stolen jewels	Unlocking the safe.

Download here