When Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out, one game feature that caught my interest was the Chronicle mode. Chronicle: a supposed catalog of every single game published by Nintendo. EVERY. SINGLE. Nintendo game up to that point?... "Hmmm...let's test the extent of that, I thought."

There were a few absences, mostly from games based on outside licenses such as Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy and the NES version of Final Fantasy. Situations like those and Dragon Quest could be forgiven, as Nintendo does not legally own those games, but one absence that stood out to me was Uniracers for Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a game I greatly enjoyed as a kid. What gives? Why are the freaking Hamtaro games (Which are much better than they sound, by the way!) being acknowledged by Nintendo, but not a game they co-produced and spearheaded. Turned out the truth for this situation is a bit wacky.

Uniracers, known as Unirally in PAL Regions, was a unicycle-themed racing and stunt game for the SNES that was released in the US in 1994 (Followed by a spring 1995 release in Europe). It was a shaking of hands between Nintendo of America and Scottish based game-maker DMA Design Limited. If the name sounds familiar, you might know DMA Design under a different name: "Rockstar North", who made an obscure game series called… “Grand Theft Auto”. At the time, DMA Design was an independent company that made games for home computers such as Lemmings, More Lemmings, and Menace.

So what was the appeal? Well, along with Rare, DMA Design was one of the few companies who had access to the SGI workstation, the same technology used the create the pre-rendered graphics of Donkey Kong Country.

With a rocking soundtrack, amusing personified unicycles, cool stunts, and (this one is what’s important to me) high-speed two-player action, Uniracers seemed like it was on track to become a Player's Choice title (a bestseller). But this was not to be.

Very soon after Uniracer’s 1994 release, DMA Design was slapped by a lawsuit from Pixar, pre-Disney acquisition days. The studio would later bring us Toy Story in 1995 and would go on to make many other great CGI animated films, but at the time they were a smaller company that mostly made short films. Pixar alleged that the main red unicycle of Uniracers infringed upon the likeness of a red, personified unicycle from one of their short films, the silent short-subject: Red's Dream. DMA Design lost the lawsuit, and the game was impounded. Nintendo was forced to limit the print run of Uniracers to 300,000 units shipped; the overstock cartridges were destroyed.

The situation was the first bad experience the DMA Design guys had working with Nintendo consoles. Their second attempt and final attempt to collaborate with Nintendo was during the N64 era with a title called Body Harvest. Nintendo objected to the violent content of the game and refused to publish it. The game was delayed as a result. Gremlin Interactive acquired DMA design in 1997 and published Body Harvest, with Midway Publishing it in the US.

It seems that Uniracers is to be impounded indefinitely. As of this writing, Nintendo disavows the game and it has never been re-released physically or digitally. Rockstar North, the succeeding studio to the original developers of the game, are locked out of their own product. DMA Design developers voiced their frustration with the situation via 2010 interviews on Nintendo Life.

Do you like Uniracers? Would you like to see it re-released? What do you think of the situation?