Sqad

Sqad (pronounced skad, by the way) is a game that was fully completed for the NES, but, when shown to Miyamoto, it was rejected as he did not see it as being fit to publish. This was a common occurrence in the NES's heyday; developers would spend valuable time making complete games only for them to be rejected. Sqad was a side-scroller game, similar to Super Mario Brothers and Monster Party. The point of the game was to explore a strange, open world and collect various artifacts found throughout it. The artifacts were then to be taken to various locations in the game that you had to figure out mainly through blind experimentation, and once all of them were in their correct locations (about 2/3 through the game) you would be taken to a fully different world. This world was much smaller, and its main purpose was to just find the final boss's lair and defeat it.
This game had a lot of oddities in it. You could collect power-ups that physically warped your character, which I think was a very progressive and unique idea for the time, something oft-seen in more recent games (I'm writing this on January 2nd, 2015). I remember the character starting off as looking like a sort-of knight, but as you would get upgrades (sometimes totally useless ones, at that), he would gain fleshy growths that seemed to meld to his armor and extend from cracks in it. I remember one upgrade significantly -- it was one that covered his sword with flesh, and made it to where swinging the sword would take one point of health away from you (you have 100 to start off with, but gain more as you go.) To make this an upgrade, though, every attack you landed gave you back 2 health. This, along with other upgrades raising speed and general maneuverability made the game get very easy towards the end.
Most of the areas you explored had no music, rather ambient tracks sounding similar to Metroid 2 on Game Boy. A lot of the areas were just oddly colored caves with platforming sections ranging in difficulty. And, of course, common enemies like bats, lizards, giant spiders, and scorpions. Sometimes you'd encounter NPCs and bosses that had dialogue appearing in the bottom right corner of your screen. They'd usually say something nonsensical or something providing a vague hint, and they had strange "portraits" taken from their actual sprites. I also remember most screens having no background, rather, they had the simple blackness prevalent in many space-shooters of the time. It felt odd, traversing areas that look as if they would be above ground with the green, grassy ground contrasting with pitch blackness beyond. I remember this game really getting to me when I was up at 4:00 A.M. fueled by coffee. Man, those were some good times.
In the second part of the game (the one after you collected all of the artifacts), I noticed that there was actually no music at all, and, really, it felt much more linear. There were a few branching sections that lead to dead ends, but it was mostly just a series of screens going from left to right with thematically fractured graphics and NPCs sharing now-anachronistic real-life advice and information. I really don't know what the developers of this game were going for, but it was definitely unique. The final boss was quite a kicker.
I remember, at the end of the long-winded second half of the game, there was an oddly detailed pit in the floor. Jumping in, I pretty much knew this was going to be the final boss. For an NES game, this had already been long -- around 10 hours! -- and I could tell there wasn't much else that could be done with my character. At this point, he was pretty much a blob of flesh symbiotically connected to his armor. I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but, looking back on it, it was a bit weird. The character started off as a standard NES protagonist, wielding a sword and fighting pretty standard monsters, but in the end he was what could be called an abomination, fighting equally abominable creatures. Strange turn of events, that. Anyways, the final boss of the game. The character, after falling for about 15 seconds I'd say, landed on a blood-red ground. Emerging from the infinite blackness of the background was what I could only compare to the Icon of Sin from Doom 2, but obviously rendered in a far more basic way. Its colors were mainly green and red, with a few yellow tinges, and it was what appeared to be the face of the devil. It looked a bit goat-like, and had massive bat wings on its sides. All it really did, though, was shoot projectiles from its eyes and fly around, knocking into you. It dealt some pretty major damage though, about forty hit-points per hit! After trudging through the repetitious fight, I finally defeated it. The creature, the horrific, Satanic creature, turned completely red, and the screen began flashing completely red. After a while of this and some rumbly 8-bit noises, the screen cut to black. Some standard NES ending theme played, feeling a bit like a Megaman copy, and "THE END" appeared in white.