Abandoned Akira Game Discovered
It’s true, apparently: in 1994 someone was developing a Western video game that used the Akira license. Anime was growing in popularity, to be sure, but it wasn’t nearly as popular in the mid-90’s as it was going to get in the following decade.
Collector Patrick Scott Patterson somehow managed to get his mitts on FOUR protoypes for Game Boy Akira, the most complete of which has a written date of June 20, 1994. He plays this version in the video below (or at least gets as far as any human can). According to him, both a Game Boy and a Super NES version were in development at one point, but both were cancelled at around 40 percent completion. The reason is unknown, but Patterson mentions they failed to license the movie score.
Whatever the GB title would have sounded like, it still would have been better than the repetitive placeholder music heard in this proto. There are the foundations of racing, sidescrolling, shmup and boss levels in the game, but not much else. The fleshy blob at the end is from the climax of the movie; we can assume this game would have been short even at a completed state.
There WAS an Akira game properly released in 1994, but it was for the Amiga computer, released by International Computer Entertainment (ICE). Patterson does not tell what developer was working on the Game Boy Akira, but the Amiga version starts out similarly with a brutally hard racing level.