Game Boy Color Promotional Demo

The Game Boy Color Promotional Demo was a cartridge used in store kiosks to show off the GBC's amazing new capabilities. It contains several tech demos, as well as colorized mockups of existing monochrome games.

Oh, and did we mention it's an excessive hack of Wario Land II?

Debug Menu


GameShark code or Game Genie code  will activate a debug menu for viewing all the demos, including several unused ones (see below). Up and Down moves the cursor, while A activates the selected item.

"F1 RACE"
XsepokvxH0M

Actually a second cube demo. Apparently, Nintendo wanted to further show off the Game Boy Color's ability to "render" polygons, but this was cut from the loop for unknown reasons.

COLOR 1


An unused intro which was replaced by the fade-out one.

COLOR 2
Identical to COLOR 1.

Wario Land II Music/Sounds
The entire soundtrack, including sound effects, is present in the ROM. Game Genie code will play any of the songs during the demo, while Game Genie codes  will play any of the sound effects at the Nintendo logo.

Link's Awakening Sprites
The sprites used for Link's Awakening in the Promotional Demo are a bit different than the ones used in the eventual Link's Awakening DX:


 * The animation of a dying monster is different from the one in DX.
 * The Moblin's arrows are green in the Promotional Demo, but brown in DX.
 * The color used for the borders of the trees is cream in the Promotional Demo, but green in DX.

Unused Graphics
Nintendo copied whole ROM banks and used what they needed for the demo, so consider what is used in the actual game to be unused in the demo.

Not Compatible with GB/SGB
When loaded on a Game Boy or Super Game Boy, the game will throw up a screen saying that you need to use a Game Boy Color. At the same time, some unused tiles are loaded into VRAM.



A pointing gloved hand, not sure where this would be used.



Possibly a placeholder icon.



The only tiles used are the - tile and the gray background tile, leaving the numbers, other punctuation, and alternate background colors unused.

Tetris DX
All of these unused graphics unless noted appear in Tetris DX as well.

Title Screen
There a few unused graphics and a ton of placeholders loaded at the title, so there may have been further plans for the title screen.



A title screen placeholder icon not loaded anywhere else in the game.



The early idea to display Tetris DX in Japanese is the only remnant left. This appears to have been placed over the placeholder tiles because there are still remaining pieces.



This copyright string was likely going to be placed at the bottom of the ENTRY.

Game Over
These three graphics cannot be seen because the demo never achieves a game over.



Unused
What appears to be an early border design for the Game Over screen. The second one appears to have an unfinished shadowing effect. The palette is a guess as one has not been assigned.