Rockstar San Diego studio founder recalls a meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto that lead to a cancelled N64 project

Diego Angel is the founder of Rockstar San Diego, the company behind Red Dead Redemption. Way back in the day, the studio was know as Angel Studios, and they were hard at work on a game for the N64 called Buggy Boogie. It's a project that would ultimately end up cancelled.

In an interview with Polygon, Mr. Angel talked about how his team was working on Buggy Boogie, a game where cars would eat other cards to absorb their powers. Angel and his team had a chance to show this game idea off to Shigeru Miyamoto himself, and Miyamoto didn't see much value in the project.

“Mr. Miyamoto came to the first meeting in San Diego. We had the honor that this motherfucker came to us. Mr. Miyamoto went and spent 10, 15 minutes look[ing] at it (the design doc), closed the big fucking book, got his hand behind [the book], pushed it to me, looked at me and said, ‘Diego, I don’t want this.’ My balls got frozen. I lost my legs. I said, ‘Fuck, fuck. I blew it.’ He said, ‘This is not what I want.’

I said, ‘What do you need, Mr. Miyamoto?’ He said, ‘I don’t want any game designs. [Let’s] spend the next three months working on the technology and making sure it feels good.’ [...] He says, ‘You’re going to throw away most of that shit.’”

While Buggy Boogie didn't pan out, Angel Studios did do other work for the N64. The company released Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. (1998), Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest (1999), and the port of Resident Evil 2 (1999).