This is a legacy article and was originally published December 8th, 2019.
Some of the unused items in Harvest Moon: 64 are extraordinarily familiar, mainly because they appeared in later games in some shape or form. We’ll be going through some of the items, tools and gameplay additions that were shelved before the game’s official release – and their appearance later in the series.
Dog Ball
Yes, the dog ball was missing from HM64 but intended to exist in the item line up. If you’ve played Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, it’s what you threw around to train your dog. So how did you train you dog in HM64? Well, by whistling and having him run after you. Better make a fence and stand on the other side and whistle at him all day.
Baby Bottle
Ever wonder why your wife always said “Please help with the baby”? You were actually supposed to help with the baby. The baby bottle was an abandoned tool, similar to baby toys that appeared in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Animal Parade. Next time your wife asks, just tell her you can’t, the Bottle was scrapped.
Gold Egg
Just like Gold Milk, the Gold Egg was supposed to appear in HM64. If you played Harvest Moon for the SNES, you’ll remember an interesting event where you can obtain a Gold Egg by climbing a beanstalk you grew (ah, the source of Pete’s fan-given name, Jack, due to the tale of “Jack and the Giant Beanstalk”). It sits unused in HM64, despite having not only a complete Gold Egg sprite but a broken Gold Egg sprite as well. Was there supposed to be a Chicken Festival just like the Cow Festival where the winning animal produced Gold Products? Or was there going to be more to Sammy the Salesman’s “Super Chicken Feed” event where your chickens actually had Gold Eggs? Unfortunately, we didn’t actually see the Gold Egg as an obtainable product again until Harvest Moon: Back to Nature.
Cooking
It was definitely an ambitious goal to add cooking to HM64, and the evidence is there. A hidden menu left behind, different foods available as objects even though they never were held in-game, and the fact that every recipe was made of available produce in HM64. It was scrapped though, and left to be added to Harvest Moon: Back to Nature and future games. Never forget: you could’ve used that sweet kitchen extension for something.
Some of the items added were a one-off oddity that came back in the form of normal cooking, like…
Rick’s Ice Cream Machine
Yes, Rick actually successfully invented something: an Ice Cream Machine. For 10,000G, you could add Milk and an Egg to the machine and get Ice Cream from it. But wait, since you helped out with making it by giving him all those Rare Metals, the Machine is only 8,000G! The curious part about this is that scenes were left in where those random trespass-I mean, visitors to your farm requested your Ice Cream. With no sprites left in, we’ll never know how big this machine was or where it was placed on your farm, but it certainly was big enough to attract the Ice Cream lovers. Ice Cream was later added to Harvest Moon: Back to Nature (albeit a lot less fun creating it). Even though we lost the opportunity of getting Ice Cream, let’s not forget the real loser here – sorry Rick, they took out one of your few invention successes.
Basil Improves Your Crops
A feature that has appeared in many Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games, Crop Improvement, was meant to be added to HM64. It turns out you could request Basil’s help with improving your produce. The only hints of this were left in Basil’s unused dialogue. As far as mechanics go, it seemed that once you asked Basil to improve one type of crop for 800G, it would affect every plant of that type on your field- changing them to GOOD quality produce. While GOOD quality vegetables were left listed in available items, they weren’t given separate product images, which means it probably was halted after the basic mechanics of it were worked out and subsequently tossed into the scrap pile.
Theories on Leftover Unused Content
Keeping Wild Animals as Pets
Some lines were left in the dialogue on your farm that were quite mysterious in their nature. Due to these lines, we have a theory that in the original plans you could keep the wild animals you caught in the woods as pets – something we haven’t seen added again in the series until the late 2000s. It would explain why Pete could carry every animal he found in Moon Mountain. So why was this scrapped? Well…it could be because the nature of the lines found were a bit bleak, and probably not content that would be approved for a children’s game. As it is, you can put Wild Animals in your farmhouse but upon re-entering, they’ve disappeared. Due to the lack of more information, it’s uncertain whether you could only collect bugs and keep them or the other animals were fair game as well. Read more about this content below (tw: death).
Checking on your Wild Animal
Seems OK.
Choices:
Let go (sends it back to Moon Mountain)
Feed. (keeps it at your farmhouse)
If you haven’t fed it a day…
It doesn’t look too good.
If you haven’t fed it in awhile…
Looks like it’s going to die.
If you haven’t fed it in a long time…
It’s dead.
If you’ve fed it…
It’s full.
Note: It’s unknown what exactly they planned for “It’s dead”, but there’s no leftover content for a funeral like there is for your farm animals.
(Article submitted by an anonymous Discord member!)
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