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Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone took us on a long journey to Sprout Valley during the Stardew Valley 10-year anniversary video that premiered today, giving us a better look at what the farming sim could have been.
"Sprout Valley, 2012," Barone announces in the video, which you can watch in full below. "An awful name." He's been forthcoming about his displeasure with the "Sprout" in Sprout Valley before, but he's hardly ever elaborated on its world in the years since it was abandoned.
Going by the "functioning," but simple gameplay footage Barone shows during Stardew's anniversary video, that might be because there isn't much to miss – especially compared to the lavish Stardew we know today. Six months into what ended up being a four-and-a-half year development cycle, Sprout Valley looked a lot like Barone's brilliant North Star, the late '90s Harvest Moon games.
Sprout Valley is similarly green and brown, with the player character bobbing around a dusty farmland to do basic things like tear up weeds, or shovel square pits out of the dust. Barone comments, "It was very rudimentary" and "much more similar to the Super Nintendo Harvest Moon game than Stardew Valley is today."
"I grew up playing Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo, and so I was heavily inspired by it, and my first target, you might say, for this game was to essentially emulate Harvest Moon," Barone continues. "As you can see, the pixel art basically looks like crap."
Now over 10 years removed from Sprout Valley, Stardew is unrecognizable – and Barone even got to meet Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada shortly after publishing his game. Could he have predicted that, or the fact that Stardew Valley has now joined its inspiration as the Platonic ideal of a farming sim?
No, no one could have. And yet, Sprout Valley is valuable, too. Barone isn't convinced the game would have found success if he had released it in its early state, but "there's something special about the naive perspective of a beginner," he says. "It's untarnished. It's fresh. It's primal. And you can't really recapture that once you have experience."
