Blades of Passage, codenamed Project Edge ( also known as Thu Lu Khan ) was a cancelled Action-RPG planned for the Nintendo 64-DD Drive. It was originally intended to be part of the North America launch line-up for the peripheral, and was built to be a sort of 3D homage and expansion to the ideas that Secret of Mana had brought years earlier.
We can read what Richard Knight , developer at Pixelplay Interactive during the latter part of game development, recalls about the project on his site moogle.net :
By the time I arrived at the studio, the project was in a state of flux. Nintendo first postponed and then cancelled the USA launch of the 64-DD, and then not too long after 64MB cartridges became a feasible reality, the marching orders were given for all projects to go to the GameCube instead if possible.
I was hired very late into development as a 3D Modeller, with the eye to move over to Design when it made sense. I started to contribute some models and level environments, but slowdowns in the project forced me to switch to campaign and story design during the final months. (Tools in the days of N64 were tremendously primitive compared to today, so I suppose this wasn’t surprising.)
Project Edge was nowhere near finished, but as the founding and sole project of the studio, there was a lot of hope behind it until the end. Pixelplay had a tremendous sense of start-up pride, and working directly with Nintendo (on an RPG no less!) was a dream for many developers – myself included – and there were people on this project before me for 3 years or more! Losing the project changed the fabric of the company more or less on the spot.
Shortly after Project Edge was shelved, the studio was reformed into Orbital Media, and N64 hardware was changed in for early Game Boy Advance development kits.
Huge props to Richard Knight for sharing some info on such an interesting lost project!
Update: Gilgamesh found some more pics!
Images:
Video (@2:10):
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