RSS
Home
From the graveyard - forgotten and cancelled games
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
With a holiday season full of blockbuster titles behind us, let’s take a look at forgotten and cancelled games that never saw the light of day. It’s a facet of the video game industry that normally gets little coverage but has increasingly found its way to front-page news with the current economic downturn that has resulted in dozens of development houses closing down, leaving many games cancelled or left in development limbo. There’s plenty that can be learned from looking at cancelled games and the dedicated folks at Unseen64 take on the arduous task of preserving the legacy of such titles for the general public.
A visit to Unseen64 will reveal little treasures like the once promised PlayStation 3 launch title Ni-Oh and the cancelled Coded Arms Assault, the latter of the two no doubt would have proven (like its released PSP launch title counterpart) that the Japanese just don’t quite get the first-person shooter genre yet.
Then there are games like Star Fox 2, which, although nearly finished, was never released for the SNES in its day. Instead, it saw life over a decade later as the ground work for the Nintendo DS hit Star Fox Command. Star Fox 2 highlights a significant industry trend: games that aren’t actually cancelled, but simply pushed onto later platforms utilizing better technology. Shenmue is a great example, starting it’s life as a Saturn game before eventually being released on the Sega Dreamcast. Onimusha was originally planned as a PSOne game. No surprise there, it certainly plays terribly old-fashioned on the PlayStation 2.
.jpg)
Then there are the uninspired dregs of the game world; games begging to be put out of their misery with the spur of cancellation. Games like the derivative Zombies for the Xbox/PS2, a hybrid of first person shooter and survival horror that was cookie cutter in every way. The screenshot says it all. It’s so dark and poorly detailed that it’s impossible to discern what’s happening, as though the developers knew just how bad the game was and were so embarrassed to show anybody their crappy work. Maybe next time they’ll come up with something a bit more original and creative. Maybe a military simulator called War, a spy thriller called Stealth, or a cutesy platformer just titled Fun. Better yet, they can take it back to the NES era and just make Nintendo DS games named Basketball, Karate, or Racing. What better way to win over the gaming public than with simple, one word game titles to compliment utterly uninspired game design?
Did you know there was once a game titled Incredible Idiots in Space in development for the original PlayStation? Surely, the title alone deemed it worthy of cancellation. Maybe they should’ve just bought the licensing rights to Killer Klowns from Outer Space and released it as a hyper bloody gore-fest. Even that would likely have just gotten banned in the same vein as Thrill Kill.
For some games, their failure is obvious and oftentimes silly. Take The Unseen, an action adventure game for the Xbox whose E3 promo video simply featured a goth girl dancing alone in a club to terrible techno-electronica. No gameplay, no story sequences, nothing of substance. Are dancing goth girls so hot that they can produce game sales simply on their own merit? In this case, the game’s title was prophetic of its inevitable fate.
Strange thing is some of these games were incredibly hyped. Back in 2002, 3DO (who shocked the world simply on the basis that they were still in business) was developing the multiplatform Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The game garnered lengthy articles and interviews in magazines like Game Informer and had Hollywood caliber voice actors like Tim Curry confirmed for the project. In fact, an official website for the game still exists. Maybe someone on the dev team is still hoping that the project will get underway way again someday. Too bad someone actually came along and played the game and saw it in action. This one never stood a chance.
Best of all, the website features removed portions of released games, some of them which ended up being major blockbusters and critically acclaimed gaming masterpieces. For example, you can check out some unused colossi from Shadow of the Colossus. Actual finished in-game versions, to boot. These sort of features shed some interesting light on the development process of even the most successful games.
Even better, you can look at prototype betas of major blockbusters like Mass Effect, a game that had considerable differences in gameplay from its early development stages compared to the final product. If you watch the X06 demo video you’ll also notice some changes in Shepard’s facial features from the demo stage to final product.
You might also notice occasional oddities like the fact that the Nintendo DS seems to have the fewest cancelled games of any platform listed on Unseen64. Looks like the platform has been so successful in its lifetime that few games ever die once they hit development. A sequel to A Boy and his Blob was in production before eventually being killed off. Maybe someone finally realized that the first game wasn’t all that fun to begin with despite having an incredibly small cult following.
Recently, my fellow Games Examiner reviewed the stellar Phantasy Star IV WiiWare release (a port of the original Sega Genesis title). Few people know it was actually designed from the ground up for the failed Sega CD platform with the intention of using 3-D dungeons, FMV anime cutscenes, and copious amounts of voice acting akin to the Lunar series. The failure of the Sega CD system, however, resulted in the game being chopped up and put onto a cartridge for the Genesis. Small wonder that the game ended up being as good as it did despite the complete overhaul.
Perhaps the wildest thing of all is knowing that the games listed on Unseen64 are only the tip of the iceberg. One can only speculate on the number of games that were cancelled and scrapped long before any official announcement of their development was made public. Sadly, the current economic downturn will see plenty more games cancelled partway through development accompanied by many game industry job losses and dev studio closures (which seem to be happening every week now). That, my friends, is the wonderful world of game development.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
