Beta footage for Kirby’s Air Ride 64 and other N64 titles surfaces

It’s always fun to see how much games change from early development to final release. Sometimes the experience is roughly the same, while other times a game’s early development days show something nearly unrecognizable from the finished project.

In today’s latest round of footage, we get a look at a bunch of different N64 games in their beta form. Some of this footage has been shown time and time again, while other clips were thought to be lost to time. Either way, this video making its way online is a big win for gaming historians and preservationists around the globe.

Most interesting of all is beta gameplay from Kirby’s Air Ride 64. For those who don’t know, Kirby’s Air Ride was originally in development for the N64 before it got shifted over to the GameCube. Obviously from a visual standpoint, Kirby’s Air Ride 64 looks quite different from it’s GameCube counterpart, but there are also some notable gameplay differences as well.

You can check out the Kirby’s Air Ride 64 footage at the 6:04 mark in the video above. It may be a short snippet of the game’s N64 days, but it’s still just as sweet!