Toon Panic is a cancelled Nintendo 64 multiplayer brawler that was in development at the Japanese studio Bottom Up for a planned late-2000 release. It never came out: Bottom Up went bankrupt in March 2000 and the project was shelved before it was finished. The design drew on the same overhead-arena, item-based combat style as Power Stone and Rakugaki Showtime, with up to four players choosing from a roster of 14 characters to fight it out on a 3D grid using pickable weapons, in the vein of Bomberman 64’s battle mode. This page hosts the unfinished 2005 auction-sale prototype, not a finished retail game, so its version number (Proto) reflects real development history rather than a labeling quirk.
How to play
Because Toon Panic never left development, there is no finished single-player game to complete and no official manual describing final controls. The prototype boots into an intro sequence with music, then drops into a multiplayer arena mode; there is no working AI, so any “matches” only function with human players filling every slot. Several debug features are still active in the build, and the character-select screen still uses placeholder art lifted from Final Fantasy VIII rather than Toon Panic’s own artwork, since the developers never got around to replacing it before the studio folded. Use the standard N64 layout to navigate menus and move around the arena: arrow keys for the D-pad/analog stick, Z and X for the primary action buttons, and Enter for Start.
Because this is an incomplete prototype, not a finished release, expect placeholder graphics, missing AI, and unfinished systems rather than a polished game.
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