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The Mysterious Mr X — A mystery no more!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 10:41 am
by Simion32

He's an unused character in DKC2. He was only shown in the German player's guide.

A picture of the elusive Mr. X:

MrX_EnhancedPhoto.png
MrX_EnhancedPhoto.png (337.21 KiB) Viewed 100189 times

EDIT:
Official Explanation According to Steve Mayles:
Kackle Replacement in Haunted Hall

Wed Jun 03, 2015 12:41pm .... Phyreburnz wrote:FINALLY WE HAVE AN ANSWER!!!
Playtonic answered this today in their Reddit AMA!!!!


Image

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 10:50 am
by Kiddy14
¬¬
Thanks for the info Simion... but, oh my god. He doesn't even has a proper description.
GERMAN: Kein Mensch kennt ihn oder hat ihn irgendwo schon einmal gesehen.
ENGLISH: No one knows him or has it ever been seen anywhere.
I wonder where he was going to be used or his special ability, his render looks pretty much completed.

Mr X

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 12:39 pm
by Mattrizzle
Upon further inspection of Mr. X's render, I noticed that the bottom of his coat is tattered and he has no legs. Going by logic, he probably maneuvered by floating.

Actually, we don't even know if Mr. X is his actual name. It sounds like a placeholder for an unknown name to me...

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 12:44 pm
by Cosmicman
I think Mr.X is somehow related to the ghost that chases you in the cart ride. Looks very much alike to him.

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 12:46 pm
by Gnawzooka
Really? I don't think so. :|

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 12:57 pm
by Cosmicman
After a closer look, well not really :lol: But they seem to have the sword in the same spot, and they both fly... Or looks like it, I don't see any feet.
Spoiler!
Image
Image

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: August 31st, 2008, 2:15 pm
by Gnawzooka
Sword...Oh, is that thing hanging off Kackle a sword? I thought it was a tail. :o

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 1st, 2008, 2:30 am
by Stone
Whoa, I've almost forgotten about Mr. X!
Thanks for the picture!

In Kackle's render, you can see his sword more clearly

Edit: Jomingo has found our secret :mrgreen:

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 1st, 2008, 7:18 am
by Jomingo
I remember reading about this at the DKU. They speculated that it could have something to do with Kackle or Kloak, as he looks pretty ghostly.

I'll try to find the topic later.

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 2nd, 2008, 6:49 am
by Swing King
I like to think either K.Rool would not be the big bad guy but Mr.X would be, or he would be Stronghold Showdown's boss until they decided to remove him from the game.

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 4th, 2008, 6:27 am
by DK4Ever
I think I agree with SK. Mr. X looks like a high-ranking officer, leg-less or not. He may have been Stronghold Showdown's boss, or maybe he was the original final boss (of at least the flying Kroc, and then you find K. Rool in the lost world.)

Besides, he looks too badass to be a normal enemy, even one like Kackle.

Mr. X for SSB4!

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 4th, 2008, 6:29 pm
by Gnawzooka
DK4Ever wrote:leg-less or not.

Are you sure he's legless? There looks to be something like legs inderneath him, but it blends into the background a little, but so does his shirt, really.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 5th, 2008, 12:16 pm
by Rodent
I think someone should email that Scribes thing at Rare.com and ask about him. We might get lucky. :D

Spoiler!
That's odd... This topic has 11 replies, but 7 views. :|
Qyz says: That's because I created it by splitting the 'replies' from other topics. The posts/replies existed before the topic did. :lol:

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 5th, 2008, 1:16 pm
by DK4Ever
Maybe. I dunno, I don't think Rare has been too keen on answering questions like this before, but it's worth a shot of course.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 5th, 2008, 4:29 pm
by Rodent
Maybe if we try it en masse...

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 7:26 am
by Jomingo
Hey, if you go through previous Scribes sections, it's hard not to find 3 or 4 recognisable DKU members having questions answered. I'm sure if we all start asking our various questions in scribes one of us would surely get an answer.

Re: Unused Sprites found in DKC Trilogy!

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 11:46 am
by Qyzbud
Jomingo wrote:I remember reading about this at the DKU. They speculated that it could have something to do with Kackle or Kloak, as he looks pretty ghostly.


Kackle? Kloak? Perhaps, but I think the similarities to Krook are more striking. Mr. X's close proximity to Klobber in that scan suggests that he may have been a drone, rather than a boss - and if that was the case, his similarities to Krook (who I believe is pictured above him in that scan) are likely, in my opinion, the reason he wasn't found in the game. Having two hooks-for-hands Kremlings was probably deemed unnecessary.

Mr. X does look rather cadaverous, with his pasty complexion, and those red eyes; it's possible that he was one of Rare's earliest ideas for an 'undead' Kremling. And after a bit of thought, it seems almost plausible that this guy is indeed Kloak, just with a less 'covered' look. When 'Mr. X' realised that he could summon objects of his choice on command, he would have been happy to do away with those awkward hook appendages, and he traded his mysterious name for an even more mysterious appearance...

Hmm. Anyway, it will be interesting to check out the DKU-ers' thoughts on the matter, I'll look for their Mr. X topic(s).
Edit: seems the discussion's actually part of a 'scrapped characters' topic, which was a DKL beta element discussion until this post.

Looks like a few of them agree with my Krook notion, although they haven't noticed/pointed out that Krook appears right above Mr. X in the scan...

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 2:12 pm
by DK4Ever
Mr. X may have been a "boss version" of Krook.

I mean, we had Zingers → King Zing

Neckys ------> Krow/Kreepy Krow

I think it would have worked, and seen as World 6 was FULL of Krooks, it would have worked out well for him to be that world's boss.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 5:54 pm
by Raccoon Sam
Just a note, it wasn't the German instruction manual, but the German player's guide.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 8:35 pm
by Qyzbud
That sounds right; they seem to take more liberties with storyline and artwork when it comes to the players guides. Still, including a beta character like this, and even putting him among the regular characters, and giving him something of a name and description... it sure seems a little strange. I wonder if any better scans of this guide are out there, and if there are more graphical rarities amongst the pages.

Simion, it's probably a good idea to edit your first post to avoid confusion. :roll:

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 6th, 2008, 8:42 pm
by Rodent
Does anyone have a picture of the scan where he appears with all the other Kremlings?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 18th, 2008, 10:54 pm
by Tiptup Jr.
Alright, I have a question: If no one's ever seen Mr. X or knows who he is, why is he in the flipping Player's Guide? I think whoever put those pictures in was toying with our minds... I can't think of a logical role for him to play in the game, he just doesn't look like a pirate.

SMALL EDIT: I've written to Scribes twice before, once under the guise of King Tippington III, and they've only replied to me once... and when they did, they took a long and lengthy letter of queries and cut it down to two sentences. So don't count on it, guys.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 19th, 2008, 6:01 am
by Jomingo
You can't deny the fact that when skimming through any recent scribes you will find at least 5 recognisable DKU members letters. I don't think it would be too hard to get in scribes, that is, if they would actually update the thing already!!!

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 19th, 2008, 4:32 pm
by Qyzbud
Tiptup's main point was that they happily go about censoring letters, thus conveniently avoiding the tricky questions... :roll:

Those devious cowards. :lol:

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 20th, 2008, 6:31 am
by Jomingo
No, they don't. Only at the end of the scribes is there a "snippets" section where they take one question from a scribes letter and ignore the rest. The rest, to my knowledge, are unedited. It's just that Tiptup was unlucky enought to be left in the snippets section.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: September 20th, 2008, 1:27 pm
by Tiptup Jr.
Wait... That's how they do it?

...I'm sorry, but that is downright idiotic. Loveday responds to the Snippets as if they're just that- Short, one or two sentence letters that aren't meant to be taken seriously by anyone. But now, how are you suppose to know if what you're reading wasn't taken out of a longer letter? I assumed they just cut my letter for the lulz, but... gosh. :(

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 10:05 pm
by Katastrophe Kong
This Mr. X guy seems pretty cool huh? ;)

Well one day I said "I wonder what he would've looked like in game"
So what the heck. It's not that good because I just wanted to make a little nice thing to have around in
my pictures, but I might tidy him up abit and give him some badges. That translation kinda sounds like "No one knows him and hasn't be seen anywhere".

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 20th, 2009, 11:13 am
by Rodent
The head needs work, but it looks prtty good. :D

I can't find the Scribes email address, so if someone gets it for us, I think now would be a good time to start a monthly mass of email until we find out who Mr X is.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 23rd, 2009, 9:51 am
by Katastrophe Kong
When I first learned about Mr. X I always thought he'd have something to do with Stronghold Showdown.
So today I was screwing around there and I found some weird sound bit glitches, also a glitch where if you jump really high (with the mega jump code), you'll slowly be swimming back down. Also I fixed my sprite.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 23rd, 2009, 1:27 pm
by Simion32
Hmm... looks better, but he may be missing a hat (it's difficult to see in the scan, but it seems he has a hat on :| ). Also, his skin color (head) shouldn't be as bright. Overall though, very nice!

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 23rd, 2009, 2:25 pm
by Katastrophe Kong
Thank you :) .I have a better quality picture of Mr.X that I got from Super Mario Wiki, and I don't see a hat. Could you make a little outline in the picture to show how the "hat" might look? Also I can't choose which palette would be better.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 23rd, 2009, 2:56 pm
by Simion32
What little can be seen of the hat shows up in both images, so I'm sure it's not because of JPG-ification or scan artifacts:
MrXHatOutlined.PNG
This outlines what can barely be made out as a hat on Mr. X.
MrXHatOutlined.PNG (18.72 KiB) Viewed 103661 times

EDIT: It would be nice if we had an ultra-high-quality PNG scan of this, it would help immensely in identifying smaller (or difficult to recognize) details.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 6:11 am
by Katastrophe Kong
I see it now :) . Is it possible to buy that player's guide on ebay somehow? :|

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 8:28 am
by Raccoon Sam
These three auctions were the only ones available on eBay.. no German ones, though.

Anyone here have any German friends who might have a chance to snoop around old Video Game stores and check for it?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 8:45 am
by Simion32
Raccoon Sam wrote:no German ones, though.
FALSE. You forgot to check ebay.de...
EBAY LINK
Mr. X is right on the front cover of the guide! What?! :shock:
a338_1.JPG
As you can very clearly see here, Mr. X does have a 'hat'.
Uploaded this on Atlas in case the eBay image gets deleted.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 9:37 am
by Katastrophe Kong
That's awesome! :mrgreen:
Well, I'd better get to work on that hat.Can you tell me which head palette would be better?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 9:49 am
by Simion32
The head palette you started out with was OK, it doesn't need to be any brighter. The bluish-gray color should be more 'defined', if you get what I mean.

Also, the Kremling heads in the background from castle levels resemble Mr. X quite a bit. Could the island originally have been owned/ruled by Mr. X?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 9:59 am
by Katastrophe Kong
Heyy! You're right! Thats an uncanny resemblance you've found, at first I thought that was supposed to be some kind of frilled Slippa. Also, those kremling heads resemble the kremling heads in the temple levels of DKC. Anyway, does this look good? :| Should I fix the hat?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 24th, 2009, 10:11 am
by Simion32
The hat looks OK.... This is as close to pre-rendered by rare as it gets, good job! I definitely can't do crazy pixel-art like that... :P

Well, the temples of DKC do have lots of those heads... but I think that might be because Kremlings that look like that commonly live on DKC island, whereas not many enemies from DKC2 resemble the heads in the castles (Kritter, Klomp, and Mr. X bear the closest resemblance to both). Hmm...

EDIT: After a comparison, the two stone heads don't look that similar. Notice the cat's-eye thing in the castle, where the temple has a plain Kremling head.
KremHeads.PNG
KremHeads.PNG (2.69 KiB) Viewed 103608 times

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: February 27th, 2009, 7:08 pm
by Rodent
They still look similar, it's just that the second one has been hollowed out so it can have a candle in it.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 1st, 2009, 2:11 pm
by Cosmicman
Someone please get a hold of that issue, I'm sure there is some info in there if X made it into the cover.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 1st, 2009, 2:29 pm
by Qyzbud
Good point, I'll see what I can do... I'll check with Cyclone first - he's the scan man - but I think he'd have shared with us if he had any juicy details about Mr X. I'm going to get my hands on as much DKC info/printed material as possible to help enrich the collection I'm working on with Cyclone and others. This would be a great document to have scans of.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 1st, 2009, 6:24 pm
by Stone
Simion32 wrote: You forgot to check ebay.de...
EBAY LINK

30 € for the players guide is ridiculous high. If I remember correctly, it was around 12.5 € when I had bought it 1995/1996 from a local videogame store.
The ebay seller even claims " Without this players guide one can barely beat the game!" :roll:

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 2nd, 2009, 8:55 am
by Raccoon Sam
You do realize that the player's guides were basically the only source of tips and tricks back then?

When I was younger and played DKC2, I never ever got 102%. Now we have the internet.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 2nd, 2009, 12:46 pm
by Cyclone
This is the only scan I have of Mr X which came from a Nintendo Power torrent.

I would really be interested in seeing more of that german players guide :D

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 2nd, 2009, 1:52 pm
by Cosmicman
Nice find, best picture of him so far. I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 2nd, 2009, 5:00 pm
by Stone
Raccoon Sam wrote:You do realize that the player's guides were basically the only source of tips and tricks back then?

Oh, I thought of beating the game without 102% :)

I hope I'll find a cheap guide on ebay soon...

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 3rd, 2009, 4:20 am
by Mattrizzle
Cosmicman wrote:I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.
What's comical about that thought is he has two hooks for hands, making him incapable of holding a sword.

And Nintendo Power Volume 76 is the September 1995 issue, which was likely released in August. A rough estimate places the info at somewhere around July of '95, about four months before the game was released in any territory!

I know this because my very first NP Issue is Volume 77, October 1995. And to think, I could have had that issue... :o

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 3rd, 2009, 3:40 pm
by Cosmicman
Mattrizzle wrote:
Cosmicman wrote:I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.
What's comical about that thought is he has two hooks for hands, making him incapable of holding a sword.


Well, I guess RARE was not thinking at the moment, i see the 2 hooks, but i also see a sword on his belt. How was he supposed to use it then?

Re: The Mysterious Mr X

PostPosted: March 4th, 2009, 10:38 am
by Rodent
I still think a mass email of Scribes would work. :P