It’s a third-person action-puzzle game starring an attractive polygonal lady… and this time it’s not Lara Croft, so we can safely say that a Tomb Raider clone has been released to the public.

In the late 1990s, seeing the success of Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark, a studio started working on a game with a female protagonist, platforming and fighting. Bits Studios’ game was called Riqa, and it was shown at E3 1999. It never made it past the prototype stage, so it’s no wonder it was delayed several times and eventually canceled. But the story doesn’t end there…

Ten Shu, one of the developers of Riqa, has already released ROMs of several versions of another of their unfinished games, Die Hard 64, so that it can be emulated. But now, for Riqa, he has documented the state the game was in during development. Camo pants, dodging lasers, climbing ladders and shooting some bad guys. The latter sounds like Tomb Raider, but in a more anime style. Our heroine even passes an unused mech.

The game is already available on the Internet Archive (and Nintendo can’t complain about that: the game hasn’t even been officially released, so they have NO say in it!), so the ROMs are there, and if you have an EverDrive 64, you can run it on it (so it would work on a console with that cartridge). Ten Shu also shows how to emulate it on a PC (you don’t really need a modern computer for that; it’s not a PS3-level game). Ten Shu worked for Bits Studios from 1997 to 2001. He worked on a lot of unreleased N64 games, and a few years later a significant number of them became GameCube and PS2 titles.

There’s just one small hitch: you need two controllers. The second controller is used for menu and stage selection. The four builds in the rar file are the last builds before the deletion; the team then moved on to Die Hard 64 and Thieveworld. The latter became Rogue Ops in 2003. The studio also worked on Die Hard: Vendetta and Constantine (movie-to-game), the latter released for PC in 2005.

Source: PCGamer, Internet Archive