Nintendo wanted to make Harry Potter games

Nintendo tried to get exclusive multimedia rights to Harry Potter video games back in the late 1990s, a new Unseen64 report has revealed.

Nintendo's vision for Hogwarts.

Nintendo of America's NST studio was given a week to develop a pitch back in 1998.
The team drew up plans to produce a game version of each Potter book as they were released - on N64, Game Boy and then the still in-development GameCube.
A spin-off based around the wizarding sport of Quidditch was also worked on, although plans never progressed beyond concept drawings and basic animations.
The first Harry Potter book launched in 1997 and, a year later, author JK Rowling began selling the rights to develop the series into a media property.





Nintendo was just one of many companies making bids for the IP - alongside Disney, Universal and Warner Bros., the latter of which was ultimately successful.
"All together it was only a week of insanely furious scribbling things to the digital artists to create animations for mock game demos," explained a Nintendo employee who worked for NST at the time.
The studio's three projects - Ridge Racer 64, Bionic Commando and Crystalis - were all placed on hold while the pitch took place.
But internal disagreement over the Harry Potter art style may have helped scupper Nintendo's chances.
Artists had originally opted for a look close to that of the first book's British cover, before Nintendo higher-ups stepped in and forced a change to a more Japanese manga style.


"It went against all my instincts based on what I had read quotes from JK [Rowling] about keeping it strictly British," the employee explained. "I had to revamp my initial designs and go more manga/Japanese - I had a big fight about that, but my boss insisted."
Nintendo's pitch was, obviously, unsuccessful, and it is unlikely the company would have been chosen regardless, against much larger offers from other media conglomerates.
Rowling eventually sold the Harry Potter rights to Warner Bros., which then contracted EA to create game adaptations of each book - and a similar Quidditch spin-off.