Prototype version
Final version
In 1991, some staff for the US magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly attended the Tokyo Toy Show. Whilst there they took lots of pictures and video footage of various games for different formats, and one of the games they taped happened to be El Viento. The footage shows part of the game's introduction sequence, but it's an early version of it, featuring a completely different script. Oddly, despite this being a Japanese show, the text for the intro is in English. Some of the notable differences include:
-Al Capone's name is used instead of Vincente DeMarco
-The text scrolls at a slower pace than the final version
-The title screen is slightly different, lacking the © the final Japanese version has
-Annet's name is spelt "Annette" (although either version is correct, from what I've been told)
Ragey looked into this and found something really interesting: this different text is actually still in the game! It's in the Japanese version only, and can be found be opening the ROM in Notepad. Having checked myself, unfortunately only the intro text is present, there is nothing regarding different text for the cutscenes. Check this page for more details.
You can see the footage here. I appreciate that some of the prototype images below are a bit small, so most of them can be clicked on to get a larger view:
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