This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 15, May 2025

Buzz has always surrounded Rataton: Slimeval, a never-released SICK game that, if rumors are to be believed, inspired Metal Slug (Nazca, SNK, 1996). SICK historians and fans alike have been trying to get in contact with the game’s developer, Will Steinhardt, for years. This April, they finally did.

The path to contacting Steinhardt ran through the game’s composer, Maxfield Dameron, a Los Angeles-based musician who a forum member accosted after a show. Finally, Steinhardt was within reach.

When a writer finally got him on the phone, he said that he’s mostly a pixel artist, but that the development window for the game was short and the SICK had performance issues when rendering complex graphics.

Steinhardt rendered the enemies, player character, environment, and boss in Blender, making him one of the first developers to use the software the same year it launched.

“I made and animated shape keys for the basic slimes,” Steinhardt said. “The boss used an armature.”

Because of the newness of Blender, Steinhardt’s excitement led him to attempt a liquid simulation for the boss’s death animation, something that pushed the SICK’s hardware to its limits.

“I spent most of [development] bouncing between making new art assets, throwing them into the engine, and then playtesting that feature only,” he said. “What was missing was actually designing the game.”

The game in question has never been playable before, but Steinhardt was able to mail Indie City Games a package with a demo disk in it. On launch, players were greeted with a sewer environment and the sight of a rat climbing into a mech suit, ready to shoot and kill slime invaders.

Because of the SICK’s fraught development cycle, Steinhardt had about a month to finish the entirety of Rataton: Slimeval. Nine hours before the deadline, however, he was still making death animations and art that didn’t end up in the finished project.

“I also left basic things like [the] title screen and credits for the last day,” he said.

Once the demo was finished and provided to the SICK’s marketing team, they scrapped the project, most likely due to low sales of the konsole itself.

When asked what he learned from the project, Steinhardt said: “Make a complete prototype to iterate on ASAP. [But] at the same time, seeing art is very motivating. It’s a balance I have to figure out.”

Rataton: Slimeval can be played on itch.io: https://hardstone.itch.io/rataton-slimeval