Ever fancied a horror game with Tingle in it? You know the one, right? That recurring side character from the Zelda series who’s constantly banging on about becoming a forest fairy? Well, good ol’ Tingle surprisingly almost starred in his own horror game developed collaboratively with Nintendo and game studio, Vanpool. According to Nintendo Producer Kensuke Tanabe, there was a genuine push from within the Japanese company to make the green-costumed wannabe fairy his very own horror title. Crazy, eh?

In a recent interview with Kotaku, Tanabe revealed that the project was pretty close to coming to fruition. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Vanpool makes odd stuff and was going to make another strange title in 2010 that somehow led to the original Dillon’s Rolling Western. “Looking back eight years ago, we were developing a horror game with Vanpool that starred Tingle as the main character,” Tanabe said, “but that project was canceled due to a variety of reasons.” Nintendo kept in touch with Tokyo studio and, Tanabe said, Vanpool developed a prototype for a game featuring a main character that rolled and was controlled with “slingshot controls” that were input with a stylus on a touch screen.

Not gonna lie: On paper, the game sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, so it’s probably for the best that this never saw the light of day. Nevertheless, it will forever remain a mysterious oddity in the pantheons of ‘what ifs’ in the world of video games. But the big question is: Would you have played a horror game starring the Hylian map-seller, Tingle? Go ahead and let us know in the comments below!