Pivoting back to a standard cartridge would have required compressing the game’s assets to an absurd degree—a financial and technical nightmare for a small studio. Simultaneously, the Nintendo GameCube was on the horizon.
The breaking point came when the publishing deals fell through. Without a financial backer to cover the costs of manufacturing cartridges—an expensive endeavor in the N64 era—the project became unsustainable. WayForward was forced to make a difficult decision. They shifted their focus entirely to the Game Boy Color version of Shantae, ensuring that the character would at least make her debut, even if it was on aging hardware. shantae 64
WayForward has stated that the source code for the Shantae 64 prototype was likely lost in a hard drive crash during the early 2000s. Furthermore, the team has moved on. In 2024, during the Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution announcement (another lost game found!), Bozon clarified, "Shantae 64 is a ghost. We love the memory of it, but bringing it back would be building a new game from scratch. And right now, we’d rather make new things for the fans we have." Pivoting back to a standard cartridge would have