Xbox 360

Six Days in Fallujah [X360/PS3/PC – Cancelled]

Six Days in Fallujah is a modern military tactical first-person shooter video game developed by Highwire Games and published by Victura, that was released in Early Access exclusively on PC, in June 2023, with future versions planned for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.

The game take place in the infamous Second Battle of Fallujah of the Iraq War. It follows the United States Marine Corps‘ 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines as they fight the Iraqi insurgency in the city of Fallujah. It contains two different campaigns, one when you play a squad of Marines who have to battle the insurgents, and an Iraqi family trying to escape the city in the midst of the battle.

But before being known in this form, Six Days In Fallujah was a very different project having experienced a very chaotic development which aroused controversies, the departure of its first publisher, and ultimately, the closure of its original developer, all the way back from 2009.

Initially, Six Days in Fallujah was a Third Person Shooter developed by Atomic Games and published by Konami, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The background of the title was already identical to the final product. It was officially revealed in April 2009 by Konami, and Joystiq managed to get an interview of some people involved in the game:

Six Days in Fallujah is clearly a very big deal for the publisher. Light on actual footage, the segment was focused on the high level of realism and accuracy its developer hopes to instill the title with. Just how accurate? That’s what we wanted to find out, so, along with fellow bloggers, we sat down with Atomic Games president Peter Tamte, creative director Juan Benito and US Marine Corps Corporal Michael Ergo, a veteran of the battle and adviser on the game.

You’ve said you have Marine veterans who fought in the battle actually working on the title. How exactly?

Tamte: It’s important for us to say, you know, that there are actually three communities that are very affected by the battle for Fallujah. Certainly the Marines. Certainly the Iraqi civilians within Fallujah, and the insurgents as well. We are actually getting contributions from all three of those communities so that we can get the kind of insight we’re trying to get.

When you say insurgents are “contributing,” what do you mean, exactly?

Tamte: I need to be careful about the specifics that I give. There’s a much broader context to that. I should answer it this way: I think all of us are curious to know why they were there. The insurgents [came from] different countries. And I think we’re all kind of curious about you know – they went there knowing that they were going to die, many of them knew that they were going to die, and they went there to die. And I think that that’s a perspective that we should all understand.

Have you actually spoken to insurgents?

Tamte: They’re involved in the creation of the game as well, as are Iraqi civilians. That’s important to us. It’s true. The game — the influences for the game came from the Marines that returned from Fallujah. But quite frankly in talking with them, it’s um, many people would just like this to be a recreation and we can’t recreate that without getting the perspectives of all the people who were involved.

How exactly are the soldiers contributing to the game? You’ve mentioned maps and battle plans, but do they point to a place on the map and say, “This went down right here?”

Benito: Absolutely. In certain cases we’ve recreated the battles and engagements of the Marines involved to an extremely high level of detail. Including incorporating some of the Marines who were there at the time during the operation in the location that they were in. And you as a Marine can experience an interact with them and fight right alongside them in the actual event in which they were fighting in the battle of Fallujah.

So the actual troops who are advising you will be in the game? 

Tamte: You will interact with Marines who were in Fallujah in those particular locations.

Benito: We’ve scanned and recreated their faces and replicated [them] and put them in the game.

Would you say the game is actually going to be “fun”?

Tamte: The words I would use to describe the game — first of all, it’s compelling. And another word I use — insight. There are things that you can do in video games that you cannot do in other forms of media. And a lot of that has to do with presenting players with the dilemmas that the Marines saw in Fallujah and then giving them the choice of how to handle that dilemma. And I think at that point, you know — when you watch a movie, you see the decisions that somebody else made. But when you make a decision yourself, then you get a much deeper level of understanding.

Benito: And that’s a really important point because we recreate the events as factually and as accurately as we possibly can. And there will be a broad range of reactions and opinions on the experience itself. And for some, they may have fun. They may enjoy it. We are recreating and presenting these events and people, I think, will have their own individual reactions to it and those will be across the board. And that’s what we want. We want people to experience something that’s going to challenge them, that’s going to make them think and provide an unprecedented level of insight into a great military significance.

Will players encounter situations like friendly fire or accidentally shooting civilians?

Benito: We wanted to recreate the pressures and conditions the Marines faced and that includes adhering to the proper rules of engagement. So for example, as you may have seen in the demo, there’s an unarmed individual at the start and the Marines didn’t fire on him because he was unarmed and that was in accord to the rules of engagement at the time.

Further details were shared in the Issue # 248 of Gamepro Magazine in May of the same year, but as I was unable to find it on dedicated website nor Archive.org, I decided to take the following information on the dedicated Wikipedia page of the title:

The team at Atomic Games interviewed over 70 individuals, composed of returning U.S. Marines, Iraqi civilians, Iraqi insurgents, war historians, and senior military officials, and learned the psychological complexity of the battle. The game’s director, Juan Benito, elaborated that “Through our interviews with all of the Marines, we discovered that there was an emotional, psychological arc to the Battle of Fallujah.” According to one of the developers who worked on the game, the development team also consulted non-fiction books about the battle as part of their research, such as Patrick K. O’Donnell‘s We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah, incorporating their recollections into the game’s events and story-line.

Atomic Games described Six Days as a survival horror game, but not in the traditional sense: the fear in Six Days comes not from monsters or the supernatural, but from the irregular tactics and ruthlessness of the combatants in Fallujah. Benito stated that “Many of the insurgents had no intention of leaving the city alive, so their entire mission might be to lie in wait, with a gun trained at a doorway, for days just waiting for a Marine to pop his head in. They went door-to-door clearing houses, and most of the time the houses would be empty. But every now and then, they would encounter a stunningly lethal situation… which, of course, rattled the Marines psychologically.” GamePro stated that for Benito, depicting the fear and misery of the battle was a top priority: “These are scary places, with scary things happening inside of them. In the game, you’re plunging into the unknown, navigating through darkened interiors, and ‘surprises’ left by the insurgency. In most modern military shooters, the tendency is to turn the volume up to 11 and keep it there. Our game turns it up to 12 at times but we dial it back down, too, so we can establish a cadence.”

Atomic Games stated that Six Days would feature destructible and degradable environments using a custom rendering engine, which they claimed surpassed the destructible environments of the Battlefield series, let alone any game released or in development at the time. Atomic Games clarified these destructible environments were not a “goofy, out-of-place marketing gimmick”, but a deliberate feature to reflect the actual Battle of Fallujah, during which U.S. Marines used explosives to breach buildings and demolish structures insurgents were hiding in. Tamte stated the game would feature “a meticulously recreated in-game version of Fallujah, complete with real life Marines lending their names and likenesses, as well as recreations of specific events from the battle. It’s almost like time travel. You’re experiencing the events as they really happened.”

Only two days after its announcement, project was already met with controversies as we can read on Gamesindustry:

Six Days in Fallujah, has drawn in calls for its ban by British military veterans, family members of soldiers and anti-war groups.

“Considering the enormous loss of life in the Iraq War, glorifying it in a videogame demonstrates very poor judgement and bad taste,” Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was killed by a mob in Iraq while serving as a Red Cap, told the Daily Mail. “It is particularly crass when you consider what actually happened in Fallujah.”

“These horrific events should be confined to the annuls of history, not trivialised and rendered for thrill-seekers to play out, over and over again, for ever more. Even worse, it could end up in the hands of a fanatical young Muslim and incite him to consider some form of retaliation or retribution. He could use it to get worked up and want to really finish the game.

“I will be calling for this game to be banned, if not worldwide then certainly in the UK,” he said.

Tim Collins OBE, a former colonel famed for an eve-of-battle speech in 2003, agreed.

“It’s much too soon to start making videogames about a war that’s still going on, and an extremely flippant response to one of the most important events in modern history,” he said. “It’s particularly insensitive given what happened in Fallujah, and I will certainly oppose the release of this game.”

Best-selling author and former SAS soldier Andy McNab, however, defended Six Days in Fallujah. War, he said, has been peddled as entertainment by the media for years.

Furthermore, he argued that the UK does not understand the Fallujah conflict in the same way as the Americans – a nation that lost “more soldiers [in Fallujah] than the whole of the British Army has in Iraq and Afghanistan combined”.

“Culturally it is totally different in the US,” McNab told TechRadar. “In America it is not as if this is ‘shock horror’ – everybody has been watching it on the news for the last seven years. The hypocrisy is in the fact that when the media wants a ‘shock horror’ story they will focus on something like this.

“In America a 90-year-old and a 12-year-old will know what happened at Fallujah. It’s on the TV, there are books about it. The game is a natural extension to that; it is folklore. The only difference being that it is presented in a different medium.

“If the game stands up and offers Americans those soldiers’ stories, then, why not?” he said.

Plus, added McNab, America’s Army has been simulating real-life events for years, and really this is no different to “killing Nazis or drug dealers” in other games; games that he has seen soldiers playing on laptops while on tour in Basra. “Culturally they are more up for it,” he concluded.

In direct contrast to his approach, however, was the Stop the War Coalition peace group, who said glorifying the Fallujah “massacre” is “sick”.

“The massacre carried out by American and British forces in Fallujah in 2004 is amongst the worst of the war crimes carried out in an illegal and immoral war,” spokesperson Tansy E Hoskins told TechRadar.

“It is estimated that up to 1,000 civilians died in the bombardment and house-to-house raids carried out by invading troops. So many people were killed in Fallujah that the town’s football stadium had to be turned into a cemetery to cope with all the dead bodies.

“There is nothing to celebrate in the death of people resisting an unjust and bloody occupation. To make a game out of a war crime and to capitalise on the death and injury of thousands is sick.

“There will never be a time when it is appropriate for people to play at committing atrocities,” added Tansy. “The massacre in Fallujah should be remembered with shame and horror not glamorised and glossed over for entertainment.”

Vice president Anthony Crouts told the Wall Street Journal that Konami was “not trying to make a social commentary”.

“We’re not pro-war,” he added. “We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience… At the end of the day, it’s just a game.”

All these reactions pushed Konami to officially leave the project on April 27, just 21 days after its announcement:

According to an article out of The Asahi Shimbun, Konami has dropped out of publishing controversial shooter, Six Days in Fallujah. The article blames Konami’s decision on the overwhelmingly bad reception the title received from Western audiances after its announcement.

“After seeing the reaction to the videogame in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it,” a public relations official of Konami said. “We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there.”

Although Atomic announced that it would not give up on the development of the game, things did not improve as the months went by. So, in August 2009, we learned that Atomic was laying off its entire workforce:
We recently reported on layoffs at Atomic Games, which followed after Konami pulled out of its partnership with Atomic Games for Six Days in Fallujah. The company blamed its inability to secure full-scale funding for the project, which forced a reduction in size at the studio.

Atomic did not comment on the number of affected employees, simply stating that development would continue with a smaller team funded by sister company Destineer Inc., which purchased Atomic in 2005. However, IndustryGamers has heard from an anonymous source who claims, “Out of 75 people, less than a dozen are left and about a third of that isn’t even developers.  The remaining team is basically a skeleton cleanup crew that will be gone soon too.  They are trying to downplay the extent of these layoffs, but the reality is that Atomic is pretty much dead.”

We’ve put in an inquiry with Atomic Games to find out about the current state of their business but have not heard back yet.

Strangely enough, contrary to most of people thought back then, Atomic wasn’t still dead, and some more information was shared by IGN in March 2010:

A source close to the game’s development confirmed to IGN this morning that Six Days in Fallujah is still planned for release, though no expected release date or publisher was named.

“I can promise you that game is still coming out and it is finished,” the source said.

Six Days in Fallujah got off to a rocky start last April when then publisher Konami dropped the title just weeks after revealing it to the press. Our source said Konami was “too scared” to publish the title after the negative reaction the title garnered.

In August, Atomic Games suffered layoffs due to the studio’s inability to secure a funded publishing deal. While the total reduced headcount was never confirmed, reports at the time suggested nearly 80 percent of the staff was let go with only a skeleton crew remaining.

The fate of the studio was very much left up in the air, but this news seems to indicate Atomic Games is still open in some capacity.

During the PAX East that took place in the same month, Atomic revealed a totally new game, Breach, which was a team-based first-person shooter multiplayer game that featured destructible environments, just like Six Days in Fallujah. It was released in 2011 but sold poorly and definitely killed Atomic Games and Destineer a few months later. In the credits of the game, 23 people worked on it, counting Human Resources. A special thanks section dedicated to people who worked on Six Days in Fallujah can be found. That section contained a total of 51 persons, including former Creative Director Juan Benito.

In the following years, Six Days in Fallujah occasionally came to our memory here and there in the press. Thus, in August 2012, more than a year after the closure of Atomic Games, we could read on PlayStation Lifestyle that at some point, SIE Santa Monica Studio could have been implicated in the game as it was hinted by David Jaffe:

Sony might have once considered publishing Six Days in Fallujah (…)

The reveal comes from David Jaffe, who tweeted about Sony developer Allan Becker, saying [emphasis added]:

Very proud this week of Allan Becker, my former Sony boss and the man who started Sony Santa Monica.*

He toots his own horn so damn rarely I bet the man doesn’t even know he has one to toot! So allow me to do it for him:

A few years back, Allan left Sony Santa Monica to take over Sony’s Japan Studio after a very, very successful run as the SM studio head. When he was at Santa Monica he spearheaded a lot of amazing games, (…). He also was the guy who funded and supported L.A. NOIRE for a long time before that game left Sony and went to RockStar, along with SIX DAYS IN FALLUJAH and bunch of other very imaginative, cool games that never came out but clearly carried the banner for ‘games as art/games-being-more-conceptually-meaningful-than-games-as-action-movies’. (…)

Jaffe’s language isn’t totally clear that Becker funded Six Days while at Sony (hence this being a rumor), but considering Becker joined SCE in 1997 and hasn’t worked anywhere else, it’s unlikely he meant otherwise.

That information was eventually confirmed, nearly 10 years later, in April 2021, by the way.

In September 2012, Peter Tamte was reached by Gamespot and shared some more information about what was going on back then:

Tamte’s vision for Six Days in Fallujah remains unchanged. (…) Authenticity comes in the form of video interviews of Marines recounting their experiences of the battle, interspersed throughout the game, as well as near-perfect re-creations of Fallujah neighbourhoods using satellite photography.

Atomic wants everything in the game to be destructible, from individual bricks to entire buildings, in order to accurately re-create the intensity of urban combat and the complications that arise from situations that involve fighting in close quarters in a civilian-heavy environment. To achieve this, the development team built the game on a new game engine designed to handle realistic structural damage to infrastructure. (However, this engine was built for the current generation of hardware, which Tamte said will end before Six Days is ready. Atomic said it is not yet ready to reveal how this will affect the game’s design.)

Three weeks later, Konami cancelled its publishing deal with Atomic. Tamte said that the decision came as a shock to Atomic, which up to that point had received nothing but support from the publisher.

“There were literally no disagreements between Atomic and Konami’s American team. We all saw Six Days in Fallujah the same way. It was the board of directors for Konami’s parent company in Japan who just got freaked out about the controversy.”

Tamte said that the board of directors of Konami’s parent company in Japan ordered the US unit to pull out of Six Days because Konami “didn’t want its brand associated with the controversy”. He still believes this was a mistake.

“I think if they had waited longer to let our story be heard, they would have benefited from the outpouring of support we’ve received for Six Days in Fallujah as people began to understand more about what it really was contemplate new ideas about what a video game could be. This takes time. Unfortunately, Konami’s board of directors didn’t seem to understand.”

More surprising than Konami’s decision to walk away from Six Days in Fallujah was the amount of encouragement and feedback Atomic received following the loss of its biggest financial backer, including more offers of help from Marines who were eager to take part in the game’s development. The challenge that Tamte and his team now face is gathering the money needed to finish the game, although not necessarily from another publisher.

“I would not say that we’re focused on finding a publisher. Our focus is on finding adequate funding. The rest can get worked out.”

Last year, Tamte started a new company, Theory.io, specialising in productivity software for tablets, mobile phones, and computers. While Theory.io won’t be involved in Six Days in Fallujah, Tamte will still be involved with the project until its release, for which there is still no set time frame. While Tamte recognises that there will always be some people who don’t want to see Six Days in Fallujah get made, the outpouring of support that Atomic has received has convinced him that the team’s efforts will not go to waste.

“I know that the story we’re going to help people experience is compelling. And, ultimately, this is what matters the most.”

The game resurfaced in April 2018 when former Level Designer Nathan Cheever shared his work on Gamedeveloper. We learned that development began in 2005 and that the project had to be reduced in scope. In his personal website, we also can read:

I didn’t originally join Destineer to work on Six Days in Fallujah (SDIF). After Turok I wanted to contribute to projects that had a longer shelf life than two months. I found that with Destineer’s new sister studio in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was focused on Serious Games.

The first project was Judgmental Shooting Simulator (JSS) — a program used to help government agencies like the FBI and CIA deal with dangerous situations. The second project was code-named Magic Bullet — a fictional espionage game, but grounded in reality with assistance directly from the CIA for authenticity.

The experience of our Raleigh team was getting noticed by Destineer’s home studio near Minneapolis. At first, several of our senior members were flown there to consult, support, and become familiar with SDIF. The title had been in production for two years already, building technology from the ground up. SDIF eventually eclipsed Magic Bullet when the company President transferred the project to the Raleigh studio. The majority of Minneapolis studio was asked to move to Raleigh and join the JSS team to complete SDIF. (…)

(…) As with any game production, the original goals evolve over time.  These typically involve some form of scope-reduction to help focus the project and elevate quality over quantity.  Over the course of four years, SDIF went from 30 missions to 8.

2005 Version

The original campaign for SDIF had 5 missions for each of the 6 Days — 30 levels total. The game world was based on the actual city, so each gamespace was huge, at roughly 40,000 game units (most tactical shooters feature less than half of that).

Vehicles were the remedy for this scale. My impression was a game that rivaled GTA in scope and complexity.

2007 Version

Reality checked in and the campaign was reduced to 19 missions. With the exception of the 1st Day, each Day now featured 3 missions each. Vehicles were relegated to special cases or as backdrop. No freeform driving allowed.

The gamespaces themselves were reduced in size as well, shrinking down to a manageable 12-20,000 game units (the size of an Uncharted Level if folded into a sandbox). This change allowed the team to have more control with moment-to-moment action. At the original scale, the only way to populate non-critical areas would’ve been procedurally, which risked being repetitive and uninspiring.

2008 Version

The third iteration occurred when the project moved to Raleigh. The total missions were only reduced by one, but the scale of each gamespace was downsized to 10-12,000 game units (somewhere in the ballpark of a Gears of War level). The change was due to technical reasons. With all of the sheer destruction we were estimating, anything larger wouldn’t fit in tech performance or memory.

2009-Q1 Version

When Konami entered the picture in early 2009, the project was now bound to a schedule. To ship in 2010, SDIF was reduced to 12 levels. Their physical size remained the same. Each Day had 1-3 missions.  Each mission was to be introduced and/or followed by an interview with a Marine who was there.

Previously scope-reduction hadn’t disrupted the highlights, events, or people met in the game. During this last change however, I had to start picking the best events and put aside less dynamic ones. Like previous versions, the experience featured 2 Fire Teams (mixed with real Marines) the player switched to depending on the location and event.

This campaign happened to be my favorite version. It had the right amount of distinctive events and variety to make the experience dynamic and memorable. One thing that set it apart from the other versions were several detached sequences that took place before each Day began.  The player was thrown into the middle of intense situations lasting 60-120 seconds, playing a different Marine each time.

In contrast to regular Campaign pacing, there were no tutorials or forgiving second-chances, no reloads.  Experienced players would be quick on their feet, recognizing their position and gear.  Inexperienced ones would be caught in the chaos and fear of the moment. You dealt with whatever the outcome was.  Did you survive?  Were you wounded? Did you save your team?

Order Revealed

When players began the final level of the game, they would realize those sequences were flash-forwarding to this final location. Familiar buildings, sights, and sounds from those frantic moments were now all connected.

Several Fire Teams were present during Hell House.  Each flash-forward recorded your choices and assigned them as goals to supporting AI Marines.  They now retraced your decisions while your own Fire Team attempts to suppress the conflict.

In a multiplayer session, each player would experience these flashes individually.  The game would randomly choose which “recording” to use, based on the number of participants in the final level. When the game was complete, players were allowed to replay these series of events and attempted a different outcome.

Like the rest of SDIF, this feature was not meant to trivialize the tragedies or heroism of the Marines who were there.  It was developed to teach players the choices and reality of war.  Training simulations have been doing this for quite some time.  SDIF was an attempt to add an emotional narrative within in a high-quality product.

The Action and Fear chart was something I learned from Turok. It helps the story arc maintain a rhythm of emotional highs-and-lows. The remainder of the information pictured was how real events were applied to each mission. They either directly influenced the encounter(s) or provided bookend moments between them.

2009-Q3 Version

The last change reduced the game to a total of 8 levels, with only 1 Fire Team. The individual scenarios would be based on the real events, but the transitions between them would be an mixture of anecdotal moments from interviews and written accounts. The player would continue to meet real Marines throughout the game, but they wouldn’t be playing with them.

Conclusion

When SDIF was first announced, modern warfare in mainstream games were still relatively new. Since 2009, it’s been full embraced (some would say exploited to sell more games). I hope the stories behind SDIF are presented in some meaningful way in the future. If production was restarted, technical concerns and controversial issues would be less of an issue now. SDIF was always about the real people and their stories, rather than flashy explosions and body count.

 

In June 2018, Variety wrote an article summarizing several development anecdotes and possible problems encountered by the team:

(…) “The idea started with a Marine sergeant who had been medevaced out of Fallujah during the battle. I knew him well because he was one of the Marines who had been sent to our offices to help us build training systems. He called me just a few weeks after the battle and told me stories from Fallujah that were just incredible. … Then, he asked me whether we could build a game to recreate these stories,” Destineer and Atomic Games founder Peter Tamte told Variety.

(…) With the primary platform being PC, an Xbox 360 port and later PlayStation 3 edition were planned. “Six Days in Fallujah” would carry the Atomic Games brand, not Destineer. “Peter [Tamte] was telling the team, ‘Look, this is a very powerful brand and web address because it was really desired. We’re going to bring this brand back to life and we’re going to use this brand for a big AAA commercial game,’” says Nathan Cheever, lead campaign designer.

Self-funded development began in early 2006.

(…) Initial design opened to a square mile of city space, around four to five blocks. Faced with combat uncertainty, players would need to make snap decisions as to how, where, and when to attack as the urban scenario made it difficult to separate enemy from civilian. Key to this endeavor was destruction.

“There were options that the marines themselves faced and utilized because they have this concept called shape the battlefield where they don’t really care about walls. They want to get the best tactical position so walls come down all the time. We wanted to give the player the opportunity too,” says Creative Director Juan Benito.

“The engine could destroy everything. It was beautiful. Everything could fall apart almost down to the brick,” says producer James Cowgill.

(…) Destruction, however, is difficult to display in video games. This involves physics, graphical changes, processor horsepower, and other complications. While “Six Days in Fallujah” did progress, many of the issues faced by the team stemmed from this destruction, leading to a development that lasted years with slow progress.

“Nobody had done destruction to this extent and still hasn’t. … Unfortunately, this decision inadvertently caused us to spend the first three years building an engine instead of a game. Building the technology or a fully destructible game world created all sorts of complications that are hard to see until you’re very far into development. Everything falls out from this one decision to create a fully destructible game world, and I’m the one who pushed for it and authorized it, so it’s my fault,” writes Tamte.

Consider the location: Alongside destruction, cultural concerns enter the discussion, particularly religious sensitivities. “Even though it was a fully destructible game, we’re not going to allow anyone playing the game to destroy mosques. We don’t want that to be recorded, videoed, and then put on YouTube and it shows people laughing. Suddenly, you’d trivialized a nation’s culture,” says Cheever.

“Everything around [the mosque] can be destroyed except that. Then it looked like we were almost making a religious statement. The power of that structure and that religion,” says Benito. We had a cutscene that was based on a real video clip that we had where Marines had destroyed a mosque and a tower was falling. Very dramatic footage. We recreated it with motion capture and animation. That had to be cut because it was seen as too religiously sensitive,” referring to a decision made by unspecified higher-ups at Destineer/Atomic.

Another level involved a firefight inside a cemetery. Although finished, that level was cut because of potential insensitivity toward grave sites. Other changes became necessary for the format.

“In the real world, you might have 200 meters of flat ground to get to the next building. In a game, that’s a lot of nothing. We shrunk things and shaped things a little bit, but they’re all based on the original locations and condensed into a game,” says Cheever.

Accuracy was tantamount to the team. Benito stated he collected over 80 hours of interviews with Marines who fought in Fallujah. Infantry Officer Read Omohundro came on as a consultant. “I started talking with the software engineers and the other programmers that were making sure some of the city aspects as well as the architecture as well at movements and behavior characteristics for the weapon systems, as well as some of the marines behavior characteristics, were in line with reality of the events,” says Omohundro.

Cowgill explained a basic scenario set-up in “Six Days in Fallujah.”

“The example we used quite a bit was you’re a squad leader and you’re clearing the left side of the street down Fallujah. You see civilians on the other side of the street in their house as you clear houses. Later, you start taking fire from that house. You have three options. You can turn around and clear that house, kick down the doors and do what you need to. Maybe get some marines injured, maybe injure some civilians, but you’re taking fire from the house. The second option is to leave it for the next squad behind you to clear so that they take the risk. The third option is to call in an airstrike. Of those three bad options, which do you choose?” says Cowgill.

With technical burdens building, a decision was made to bring “Six Days in Fallujah” entirely to Destineer’s Raleigh, North Carolina location. Cheever remembers four or five levels in an alpha state after a year or more of development, and once the Raleigh team was set, “Six Days in Fallujah” underwent a reboot.

Gone was the open approach and levels condensed into tighter designs, both for the sake of destruction and scheduling.

“At the end, because the events happened on different phase lines that happened north to south, we decided to have two different fireteams [of four marines],” remembers Cheever.

In addition to a shift in focus, Cheever recalls a “death by demo” process, where the team is pulled off the main game to develop demos or proof of concepts for trade shows or potential publishers. “That halts development of the complete game because people keep getting sucked into expressing things that will not be done in the full game,”he says.

“The view at the time was always to put the best foot forward. …. that drains away resources from the main development. We’d often find ourselves creating an important demo for a specific aspect of the project, but it created quite a drain on the team,” says Benito.

Tamte disputed this schedule, however. “The game was self-funded for the first few years and then found funding very quickly the first time we needed it, so there were only 3-4 times during 4 plus years of development that we built a one-off so we could market the game to someone.”

Those someones varied over the years. Destineer/Atomic Games sought a variety of publishers, from industry giants like Electronic Arts (who potentially viewed “Fallujah” as an extension of its Medal of Honor series) or Bethesda Softworks. Atomic even approached console makers Microsoft and Sony. None of their pitches were successful. “The biggest challenge was that most of the ones that could afford to publish ‘Six Days’ already had their own military shooter franchises either in development or on the market,” says Tamte.

EA, for instance, did reboot its Medal of Honor series but did so on their accord in 2010. Others were concerned by the content and how this could impact their market share outside of the U.S.

“Some of these publishers were headquartered in Europe or Asia that have completely different geopolitical frames of reference on the Iraq war,” says Benito.

One publisher did take on “Six Days in Fallujah.” That was Japan-based studio Konami who signed on in 2008. For a year, Konami supported “Six Days in Fallujah’s” development, if not in the way the developers hoped. Announced at Konami’s Gamer’s Night in 2009, “Six Days in Fallujah” featured alongside the likes of horror games Silent Hill and Saw: The Video Game. Konami brought out a Fallujah veteran to speak, then pushed out a sizzle reel of real-world Iraq war footage combined with run-and-gun gameplay footage, muddying the message.

Basing “Six Days in Fallujah” in reality brings up a number of difficult questions. In a hunt for accuracy, a debate began internally regarding the depiction of actual soldiers. The answer was not to include real named soldiers as playable characters, although this didn’t end the debate.

“Would there be support characters that were real characters in the game? And if they are there, how do you deal with them being killed or is it just a game situation where they don’t die? Or, everyone is made up and it’s just the interviews that express the idea with the real people,” explains Cheever.

“We eventually arrived at a place where we had all of the reality in the book-ended video documentary pieces and we had it in the reality of a tactical situation, but the marines themselves were somewhat abstracted. … We worked with over a dozen marines during the entire phase of development. They inspired marine characters in the game. We didn’t show any real individual or simulating them losing their life. That would have been beyond the pale,” says Benito.

For full accuracy, Destineer’s team asked an American Iraq-based journalist to interview people in Fallujah, to hear their side, even some insurgents.

“I probably had sixty hours of marine interviews and another 20-25 hours from Iraq itself. … the real problem was we were going for a real documentary which meant more than one viewpoint in trying to get the whole story, being real journalists,” explains Cowgill.

That job, of an Iraqi reporter, was not an easy one and put some people in real danger. “Iraqis in Fallujah assumed he was CIA. He couldn’t go back into the city after helping us because they thought he was a spy. He had hired a couple of Iraqi journalists to get the stories and talk to people but it became dangerous for all of them after that because of that environment,” explains Cowgill.

Between a failure of pre-release marketing to tell the public about the documentary approach and the idea of insurgents being involved, “Six Days in Fallujah” came under fire. (…)

The general public’s perception of a video game, along with the content of “Six Days in Fallujah,” made marketing problematic.

“Everybody had some form of Call of Duty in their head of just a run and gun shooter, nothing but fun. The storytelling and documentary aspects were completely lost in the messaging,” says Cowgill.

“It felt like a siege. We knew what was happening in the studio. We knew the validity of the content we were making, and the vision around it. I was convinced and I think the team was as well. We weren’t able to articulate that to the outside world in the way we wanted to. It all felt like a big, unjust misunderstanding,” says Benito.

Development continued until late April 2009, the same month as the Gamer’s Day demo. On a day when Benito completed negotiations with Evan Wright, writer oof the book Generation Kill, to pen the story, the phone rang. “I had just started lunch, then I got the call that Konami was pulling the plug. Then I had to go back in and finish lunch.”

“I got a phone call from the EVP at Konami who oversaw our project to explain that Konami of Japan was going to announce it was pulling out and that it would be in the next day’s Tokyo newspapers,” writes Tamte.

Fear over “Six Days in Fallujah’s” real world content and media coverage scared Konami higher-ups. “Basically, once Konami Japan realized they had a controversial game on their hands, everything just went quiet from Konami. The support just dropped,” says Cowgill.

This did require Konami to renege on their contract, using a ‘termination for convenience’ provision. “This allowed them to pay us a fee to terminate the agreement, in which case 100% of the rights to the project would revert back to us,” explains Tamte.

Back into the publishing waters Destineer went, funded by the termination agreement, and on another hunt for a potential publisher. However, by this time, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare turned into a blockbuster, and publishers had their own counterparts already in development. Destineer even sought a studio in Russia. “Fallujah” didn’t fit their schedules, and Destineer was denied.

“After it became clear that none of the big publishers could do ‘Six Days,’ we wound down the team to just a core group and created a new game called Breach with our game engine,” writes Tamte.

“Breach was essentially the multiplayer child of ‘Six Days’ in the effort to save something,” says Cowgill.

“Breach” debuted on the Xbox 360’s digital Xbox Live Arcade service in January 2011, breaking even financially, not enough to sustain the studio. Destineer shuttered in May 2011.

With the advancement of technology and distance from the Iraq war, something like “Six Days in Fallujah” might carry market value today.

“I think now enough time has passed and people have seen the diversity particularly with virtual reality games and how that technology is so different. I’m hoping one day we’ll be able to get to a point where this documentary type video game, or this reenactment through gaming technology, will allow people to experience something that wasn’t physically possible 10 years ago,” says Omohundro.

“You would have learned something. That was the biggest thing I was excited about. If people played through it, they would have realized wow, military, war is not something to be completely trivialized,” says Cheever

To Tamte, not all is lost. Atomic Games is still a brand and he holds all of the necessary pieces.

“I archived all of the assets for ‘Six Days in Fallujah,’ including the interviews we conducted with Marines just weeks after the battle, terabytes of video, photos, and documents from the battle, as well as all the game code and art assets,” writes Tamte.

“Someday,” he said, “we are going to finish what we started.”

In February 2021, the game was officially back on track. It was released in Early Access in June 2023, exclusively on PC, with a Roadmap and future releases planned for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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XCOM (The Bureau: XCOM Declassified) [PC, PS3, 360 – Cancelled]

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a science-fiction tactical Third-Person Shooter game released in 2013 on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, developed by 2K Marin and 2K Australia, and published by 2K Games. It is based on the turn-based strategy series of the same name.

Before being released in this form, the game was initially planned to be a First-Person Shooter with horror elements. Its development was very chaotic and spanned approximately for 7 years, with various changes of responsabilities and developers, alongside communication issues.

The development story of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was shared in August 2013 by Polygon. It began in 2005 when 2K Games/Take-Two Interactive acquired the licence from Atari which was in financial trouble. The following year, the publisher bought Irrational Games which operated in 2 studios, the main office in Boston, Massachusetts, and its subsidiary in Canberra, Australia. Both companies were tasked to work on a new X-COM game and started some different pitches:

In 2005, Take-Two purchased the rights to sci-fi strategy franchise X-COM from Atari. In retrospect, its motive was obvious. The publisher was in the midst of acquiring an enormous amount of talent, and wanted an established video game franchise that could be pushed immediately into development. Following their acquisition by Take-Two in 2006, Irrational Games and sister-studio Irrational Games Australia were renamed 2K Boston (we’ll continue to call it Irrational for clarity, since it switched back to its original name later) and 2K Australia.

Both studios quickly began conceptualizing X-COM games. At this point, Irrational was still a year away from releasing BioShock, which would rocket the studio and 2K Games to mainstream relevance. Irrational team members liked the idea of a second project, and Ken Levine was an outspoken fan of the original X-COM games. A small group crafted a handful of pitches. One of the earliest pitches, claims a source, was a loyal sequel to the classic X-COM games. The engine Irrational used to power its tactical superhero game Freedom Force seemed like a perfect fit for X-COM’s tactical strategy design. However, that concept was scrapped early on for an X-COM first-person shooter.

But translating the storied strategy franchise into a new genre proved difficult. Concepts were created in rapid succession, most of which never made it past the storyboard phase. Ownership of the project bounced back and forth between the Boston and Australia offices as both teams struggled to find a way forward. The pitches shared some similar elements, like the theme of resistance. One pitch imagined Earth post-invasion and full of resistance fighters. The intention was to create scenarios in which humans were outclassed, outmatched and outsized. A source describes one storyboard pitch in which a hero — who resembled Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl — placed boom boxes on plinths in a city square, inspiring humans to rise up against their alien overlords.

In another pitch, which developed into a full demo, the player escaped a commandeered an alien vessel by selecting a location on Earth and transitioning from the ship, through the cloud and onto the ground. In a later scene, the player climbed the back of a giant alien, searching for a way to kill it. This demo was, according to a source, “E3 ready.” Most of the single-player pitches came from Irrational. 2K Australia, meanwhile, focused on creating a multiplayer mode. One demonstration involved asymmetrical team-based multiplayer, with one side playing as humans and the other as aliens. The mode, according to one source, was similar to the Aliens vs. Predator series, with the various races having unique abilities and weapons.

In 2007, following the advancement of BioShock’s development, Irrational Games took the decision to fully focus on that project, leaving 2K Australia as the sole developer of the new X-COM game. The multiplayer mode planned by them was dropped in favor of a single-player campaign. However, later in that year, 2K Games decided to put 2K Australia as a support developer for 2K’s other subsidiaries. For more than 2 years, between the release of the first BioShock and the release of its sequel in February 2010, the X-COM project wasn’t a priority:

By 2007, BioShock had taken shape. Seeing BioShock’s potential, Irrational head Ken Levine decided the studio wouldn’t continue development of an X-COM game, and the project transferred fully to 2K Australia. The multiplayer prototype was scrapped, and 2K Australia began work on a single-player campaign. Though, according to a source, team members at 2K Australia chose to build off one of Irrational’s final concepts: a first-person shooter set in the 1950s in which humanity is woefully under-equipped to fight an invading alien menace. The rest of the game — the story, the mechanics, the point — would be revised.

From late 2007 to early 2010, 2K Australia was tasked by the publisher to act as the developer equivalent of the supportive best friend to the publisher’s other studios. First it helped Irrational finish BioShock, then contributed to the game’s PlayStation 3 port. In 2007, a handful of high-level employees left Irrational to found a California-based studio called 2K Marin, which was built initially to create BioShock 2 and become a premier studio within 2K Games, producing a new IP of its own. 2K Marin needed help, though, so 2K Australia supported the development of BioShock 2 until its release in early 2010.

For three years, alongside this work, a small group within 2K Australia continued work on X-COM, but finding time and resources was a chore. Progress slowed. With BioShock 2 finally out the door, the team looked ahead to finishing X-COM and establishing 2K Australia as leading triple-A studio. 2010 should have been a great year for 2K Australia. With BioShock 2 shipped, the studio finally had its chance to lead a game, and escape this unexpected de facto helper role.

Some people at the publisher side of 2K believed 2K Australia had had a good deal of time — three years by their count — to nurture the X-COM pitch. They were pleased with the initial concept — even though, one source claims, the original vertical slice had been built by a skeleton crew. They named their pitch “X-COM: Enemy Unknown.” The creative leads at 2K Australia wanted the game to be mysterious, and hoped to create a first-person shooter that elicited fear and confusion. The subtitle, Enemy Unknown, wasn’t just a play off the original X-COM’s European title, which was also Enemy Unknown. It was more like an explicit mission statement: You could see the enemy; you could fight the enemy; but you could never truly know the enemy.

The elevator pitch was essentially the original X-COM meets The X-Files, set in the 1950s to 1960s. The time period — something close to it, at least — would survive years of revisions. Practically everything else would not. As a government officer, the player had neither the weapons nor the technology to fight the futuristic aliens that were invading Earth. But they did have a handy camera. The core mechanics of the game were researching and running, with a splash of shooting. The player’s most important skill was photography.

The pitch was, in some ways, strikingly similar to those of the original X-COM games, despite being first-person. The player would select missions from a number of locations on a map. While the general construction of a stage would remain the same each playthrough — the streets and homes of a suburb would be static, for example — certain aspects of the missions would be procedurally generated. So the enemies you encountered, the location of valuable information, the entrances to rooms, the time of day and the mission goal would be a different combination each time, allowing the player to freshly experience the same stage multiple times.

The other half of the pitch focused on the X-COM base. After collecting information, the player would return to an appropriately retro 1950s military base. Here, the player would complete research goals and devise strategies for future missions. The art direction was abstract. Aliens would be wisps of air, globs of goo or puffs of clouds. The first enemy was the titan, the large obelisk that would later be the iconic centerpiece of the game’s marketing materials.

Character 3D model named ‘Rebel Girl’, owned by Irrational Games. Might be from the 2006-2007 iteration.

As it was pointed out by Polygon, following the release of BioShock 2, a large part of 2K Marin was brought in to help 2K Australia developing X-COM. While the single-player campaign was still the focus of 2K Australia, 2K Marin began creating a brand new multiplayer mode for the game, this time similar to Left 4 Dead games. However, communication issues started to surface, as both developers were located on different continents:

Following the release of BioShock 2, 2K Marin’s staff was divided into three groups. The first was a small, multi-discipline team assigned to BioShock 2’s downloadable content. The second consisted of five of the studio’s senior employees who would conceptualize and pitch a new IP for Marin to begin following X-COM’s completion. The final group, which consisted of most of the studio, was assigned to X-COM. To alleviate communication issues between two continents, the publisher assigned 2K Marin to multiplayer responsibilities, while 2K Australia continued work on single-player, (…)

The work seemed doable, according to multiple sources, if not ideal. The division of labor resembled something akin to a outsourcing, and Marin was too large and responsible for too much to have minimal creative input. Marin spent the first few months developing multiplayer designs, building a framework and modifying 2K Australia’s single-player engine to run multiplayer settings. The earliest multiplayer prototype was a survival game in which four players worked to reach a certain point on a map. It resembled Left 4 Dead, complete with an artificial intelligence director deciding when and how to spawn enemies.

Meanwhile the relationship between 2K Marin and 2K Australia remained creatively and structurally confusing, further troubled by the difficulty of simply scheduling a daily conference call across an 18-hour time difference. Most communication took place between the mid-level producers at both studios, who would pass along task lists from Australia to Marin. Team members at 2K Marin felt they didn’t have a direct line of communication back to 2K Australia for when they had questions or alternative ideas. Both sides craved the simple ability to sit in a room with co-workers and hash things out.

XCOM was officially revealed in April 2010 by 2K Games. The same day, decision to merge 2K Australia into 2K Marin was made. This wasn’t well received by many members of both studios for different reasons, and, above all, the communication issue between them was still there. Quickly, it was all clear that the single-player mode and the multiplayer mode wouldn’t reach the alpha state milestone scheduled for November 2010, and 2K wanted a public presentation for E3 2010. Again, the multiplayer mode was scrapped, and 2K Marin had to help 2K Australia for the single-player campaign:

On April 14, 2010, the publisher merged 2K Marin and 2K Australia under the single banner of 2K Marin. It’s unclear whether or not this was an intentional play to artificially bond the two studios. Whatever the case, the name change was not well received by many members of both studios. Australia felt it was losing its identity. Marin felt that it was absorbing a team of developers it hardly knew. The press release quaintly referred to the two as “sister studios.” On the very same day, 2K announced XCOM to the public.

In the press release, the game was simply called XCOM. No hyphen. No subtitle. The words “Enemy Unknown” were abandoned, though the press release emphasized the “unknowable” theme of 2K Australia’s original pitch, mentioning the player’s “frailty — against a foe beyond comprehension.” The press released described XCOM as a “Mystery-filled first-person shooter from the creators of BioShock 2,” which wasn’t entirely true. 2K representatives clarified that the game was being led by the the Australian division, referred to by this wordy label: “the Canberra, Australia arm of 2K Marin.”

Renaming the studios didn’t fix their problems. The team in Marin continued to receive instructions via task lists from Australia, and resentment began to build within both studios. Marin wanted more creative input — its name was now on the project. Australian wanted its chance to lead a project — even if it was now the “wing” of another studio. The name didn’t fix the the studios’ biggest problem: a fruitful line of communication wasn’t coalescing.

By May, it was clear that Marin’s multiplayer and Australia’s single-player would not meet the alpha milestone scheduled for November 2010. 2K chose to scrap the multiplayer and assign Marin to help Australia complete the single-player campaign. The two developers, separated by half a world, had barely a month left before XCOM’s scheduled first public presentation at E3 2010.

Subsequently, the tasks were shared with 2K Marin in charge of mission design, and 2K Australia the strategy layer base. But some struggles were still there, especially for 2K Marin’s programming and animation departments, which were unable to properly execute 2K Australia’s vision regarding the enemies. On the other hand, communication improved a lot, but, slowly, 2K Marin started to have more and more influence on the design:

To maintain a degree of compartmentalization and prevent communication issues, 2K Marin was assigned “Field Ops,” the first-person missions, while 2K Australia worked on the strategy layer of the XCOM base. Though designing the base was 2K Australia’s priority, the studio’s leads also directed the design for field ops, being developed by Marin. This, according to many sources, caused a good deal of creative tension.

2K Marin’s various departments struggled to execute on Australia’s direction of mysterious levels and unknowable enemies. Sources say the themes were difficult to express in moment-to-moment gameplay. Animators struggled with telegraphing the attacks of the amorphous goo enemies, and programmers failed to express how the enemy or the player took damage. Despite the game being labeled a first-person shooter, its core mechanic was research, via taking photographing evidence and retrieving information. The goal of a mission was typically to keep an enemy alive, and extract research from it. But because most enemies lacked faces, artist and programmers labored over ways to express the direction a character looked and whether or not the player was in its line of sight. This made the stealth nature of research missions particularly difficult. The very simplest mechanics of most games — like knowing whether the enemy was looking at the player — were made difficult by the too-alien nature of Australia’s enemies.

If the project wanted to progress, problems needed to be worked out face to face, person to person. So the leads at both studios agreed to make it happen. To ease the tension and clear the lines of discussion, the two studios began swapping small groups of employees, sending developers on the nearly 12-hour journey across the Pacific Ocean from one location to the other, for weeks and months at a time. It sort of worked. According to many sources, communication gradually improved, but the building frustrations had taken a toll. An exodus of employees had already begun. With communication improving, 2K Marin slowly influenced the creative direction of the project. Leading up to E3 2010, the studios began to focus on research and upgrading abilities within XCOM, and decreased the emphasis on strange, mysterious encounters. The design was changing.

A vertical slice of the game was ready and showed behind closed doors at E3 2010. Reactions from the media were very mixed, as many had difficulties to understand why this new entry was a First-Person Shooter, instead of a turn-based strategy game. Many previews based on this presentation were written. For its part, Joystiq concluded:

While there are still some unanswered questions — 2K Marin wouldn’t say whether or not you can issue squad commands, for one — I walked away from the demonstration fairly impressed. At the very least, 2K Marin has nailed the feeling of the old X-COM games, especially the feeling of otherworldly fear during missions. If the research progression manages to be as addicting as it was in the originals, XCOM just might surprise some die-hard fans. It certainly surprised me.

But after E3, troubles occured following the departures of two key members of 2K Australia, prompting, again, 2K Marin to gain more influence in the design department. Also, concerns were still present for the enemies design, which was responsible of many gameplay’s problems, and the decision to reboot the project was taken. Several pitches and prototypes for new features were made by 2K Marin:

In late 2010, 2K Australia was rocked by the high-level departures of Art Director Andrew James and Design Director Ed Orman. 2K Marin plunged into the leadership void, quickly taking on additional creative responsibilities. Members of Marin had already been promoted to senior roles, even before the departures, so they were easily slotted into the updated org chart.

There was internal concern amongst leads at both studios and the publishing side of 2K that XCOM would not be completable if it continued down the path of “mysterious” enemies and a research-based mission structure. The project underwent a small reboot. The leads wanted to protect much of the work that had already been done on the game. The hope was to find something that would improve XCOM, and allow it to ship sooner, rather than later. The overall structure would remain the same, but the in-level experience would change.

During the reboot phase, the game’s leads at 2K Marin wanted to establish whether the backbone of the game would be shooting or stealth. Members of the various departments within Marin began rapidly creating pitches and prototypes for supplemental features, pushing again for familiar, readable tropes from other games. Some of these included a Splinter Cell-like mechanic where enemies saw the player’s last known position. Another prototype resembled a traditional third-person shooter. At one point, a suspicion system was in the game, in which the player’s unusual behavior would alert the aliens, a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Around this same time, the designers decided to give the player control of the two squad mates, an option that hadn’t been available in the 2010 builds. Control of squad mates was initially limited, but made the game more strategic, and inspired some team members to pitch the shift from first-person to third-person, allowing the player to see more of the battlefield. The ideas would be grafted onto the current build to, ideally, strengthen what was already there. One source describes this iteration of XCOM as “a victim of its own timeline,” stuck with systems and tools that had been chosen years earlier. Intentionally or not, the groundwork was being laid for a larger reboot.

2011 wasn’t getting better for 2K Marin and the game. First with the cancellation of their new I.P. in order to refocus resources on XCOM, then with new changes for the title: story, level design and enemies. 2K Marin became the lead developer instead of 2K Australia:

The Marin directors who had been working on the new IP were gradually put on XCOM, and the new IP was canceled, further damaging the morale of the team at Marin. One source claims many employees had taken jobs with the studio on under the impression BioShock 2 would be followed by the new IP and the studio would become one of 2K Games’ premier developers. XCOM had been seen, at first, merely as a small, quick support job for 2K Marin. Suddenly, the new IP was gone and the team was stuck in what was beginning to feel like a development quagmire. Some at 2K Marin felt as if they’d inherited another studio’s problems.

Whether or not XCOM would be released seemed, briefly, inconsequential. The purpose of 2K Marin had changed. It wasn’t to be 2K’s new premier studio which would — alongside Irrational and Firaxis — produce high-budget games based on its own IP. Instead 2K Marin had become something else: a clean-up team.

Jordan Thomas, who served as the studio’s creative director, became the narrative lead and overhauled XCOM’s story. The previous version hinted at American civil rights issues in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Thomas brought these story details into the main storyline, and moved the story to the year 1962 to play off global Cold War paranoia.

To streamline the development, the game was restructured as a linear sequence of levels — casting the randomized level sets to the wind. Furthermore, humanoid enemies were introduced to the cast of villains, with the previous mysterious enemies taking supplemental roles. 2K Marin was becoming the lead studio.

In the spring of 2011, 2K Games approved that 2K Marin was going to do a totally new demo for the next E3, instead of working on the current version, which displeased some senior employees. That demo was made in 10 weeks, but it wasn’t enough for 2K Marin to implement every new features they wanted to make. The pitch initially made by 2K Australia was discarded:

Multiple sources claim senior level employees at 2K Marin weren’t happy with the state of the game leading into E3. One source describes the early 2011 build as a hodgepodge of previous iterations. In the spring of 2011, senior team members asked 2K for permission to put the current version aside and instead spend the 10 weeks leading to E3 constructing a demo for the game the team wanted to make. This was a chance for a fresh start — or something like it.

According to one source, the publishing side of 2K was supportive. With the random levels and detective mode of 2K Australia’s pitch removed, the current version of XCOM lacked a hook that elevated it above a generic first-person shooter. The source claims that 2K executives were and still are vocal about releasing high-scoring games and believed more time might produce a better final product. In theory, the task was comparably straightforward: switch the perspective and add some new powers and alien abilities. The art assets could be salvaged. The game could be saved.

For the demo, the senior team members wanted to add a third-person perspective and expand squad control, but neither fit the current build of the game. There wasn’t enough time to make the entire demo run in third-person, so for a second time 2K presented XCOM at E3 as a first-person shooter — despite the fact that the 2K Marin team knew the game would ultimately use the third-person perspective. In the demo, a first-person character directed squad-mates by shifting to a third-person perspective — the shift to a paused third-person meant they didn’t have to animate the lead character just yet.

The press reacted favorably to the demo, more so than it had the year prior during the behind-closed-doors presentation. Typically, a game’s E3 appearance is followed by a slow-drip of publicity, including screenshots, trailers, developer diaries and interviews, but the XCOM project had been totally silent. Jordan Thomas explained by saying, “We just felt it wasn’t X-COM enough.” 2K announced the game’s release date: March 6, 2012, less than a year away. XCOM had been scheduled to launch against Mass Effect 3, possibly the biggest sci-fi game of the generation.

After E3, the start of what would become The Bureau: XCOM Declassified began within both studios. Cleared once and for all of the communication issues, those two teams decided to definitely pivot on a Third-Person tactical shooter, instead of a horror First-Person Shooter. But this pivot caused additional delays in the development since a large part of the game had to be redesigned:

The E3 2011 demo served as the template for the revision of XCOM as a tactical third-person shooter. Beginning with the creation of the E3 demo, both studios felt there was a clearer sense of creative direction. It was the most collaborative year, according to one source, with many more employees shuttling back and forth between the Marin and Australia offices.

According to one source, Thomas decided XCOM would be a bridge between the Firaxis game and the original series. The gameplay would pivot on the third-person tactical shooter genre, making a clear and definitive cut from the stealthy, horror style of the original pitch. The team even contracted a voice cast, recording the script in 2011. (According to another source, most of those roles would be recast over the next year.) But even with the improved work environment and creative guidance, development was taking longer than expected — particularly because the switch to the tactical genre required many environments to be completely redesigned.

The rest of the story no longer concerns those scrapped versions of XCOM. Sadly, further development of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified didn’t went well as 2K Games was the target of everything that went wrong during 5 years of development from this point on, alongside losing money in this still-not-released title. In order to solve some problems, they decided, in October 2011, to entirely remove 2K Australia from the game, and many higher-ups of 2K Marin changed responsabilities and roles, especially Jordan Thomas, who left the project and joined Ken Levine on BioShock Infinite. After some additional setbacks, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was released in August 2013 and got mixed reviews by the press.

XCOM wasn’t the first failed attempt at taking risks for the franchise. Years prior, another canceled hybrid First-Person Shooter/strategy game named X-COM: Alliance was on the way and suffered of 7 years of development before being canceled in 2002, not without having to change publishers and developers many times.

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Marvel: Chaos [X360/PS3 – Cancelled]

Marvel: Chaos is a cancelled superhero fighting/brawler game developed by Electronic Arts Chicago and published by Electronic Arts around 2006-2007, for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. It featured several playable Marvel Comics‘ characters, alongside destructible environment.

Few details were available about this game as it was officially revealed during the San Diego Comic-Con 2007 in July, and officially cancelled in November of the same year. During its announcement, Gamespy wrote:

Electronic Arts announced that famed development cell EA Chicago (developers of Fight Night and Def Jam: Icon) has signed on to build an all-new slugfest featuring Marvel Super Heroes for Xbox 360 and PS3.

Not many details apart from the game’s planned existence have been revealed as yet, but with a little luck, we may be able to score some face time with EA Chicago’s bombastic General Manager Kudo Tsunoda. In the meantime, we’ve got some quotes from madman Tsunoda to tide you over, such as, “We looked at past comic-based games to find out what was missing and what was needed to successfully translate the intensity, excitement and fiction from comics into fighting games.” Tsunoda also stated, “We’re challenging ourselves to make a game that delivers on the Super Hero promises of past top-tier fighting games.”

Unfortunately, the game was quickly cancelled and EA Chicago closed down by its parent company, as stated in November 2007 by GameSpot:

Last week, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello announced in a quarterly earnings conference call that the publisher would be weathering a round of layoffs and studio closures. At the time, the only operation confirmed for closure was the EA Chertsey studio in the UK. Today, GameSpot has obtained an internal EA memo stating that EA Chicago is also being closed.

EA Chicago is best known for its work on the Def Jam and Fight Night franchises. It had been working on a new licensed Marvel fighting game, as well as a second fighting game based on a new intellectual property. The Fight Night series has already been moved to an EA Sports studio, and an EA representative said that announcements would be made regarding EA Chicago’s other projects in the future.

The memo, sent by EA Games president Frank Gibeau, states that EA will announce the closure today, and calls it “the toughest decision I’ve made in my career–one that in no way reflects on the talent and dedication of the people who work there.” Gibeau singled out studio general manager Kudo Tsunoda as one of the best creative minds in the industry, and said that many of the affected employees will be offered jobs at other EA locations, with those leaving the company receiving severance and outplacement assistance.

“We’re willing to take risks, make long-term investments, and to support teams and individuals between launches,” Gibeau said. “But each team is responsible for staying on a reasonable path to profitability. Sticking to that strategy is what gives us the financial resources and flexibility to take risks on new projects.

“Unfortunately, EA Chicago hasn’t been able to meet that standard. The location has grown dramatically in the past three years while revenue from the games developed there has not. The number of employees has grown from 49 in 2004 to 146 people currently in the new facility in downtown Chicago. As it stands, EA Chicago has no expectation of hitting our profitability targets until FY2011 or later.”

Gibeau stressed again that the company was willing to take risks and make long-term investments, but added every game must “be committed to delivering a reasonable expectation of profitability” if the company’s corporate philosophy is going to work.

“It’s a performance commitment that binds us together and ensures we have the resources we need to invest back into our people and creative output,” Gibeau said.

Over the years, an Xbox 360 prototype has leaked on the internet.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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Armageddon (Boanerges Studios) [X360 PS3 PC – Cancelled]

Armageddon is a canceled Christian futuristic squad-based First-Person Shooter developed by Boanerges Studios and published by Atari from 2005 to 2006, for the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 systems.

As we can read on the now-defunct Boanerges website, Armageddon was:

“A story-driven multiplayer FPS set in the end times. In the near-future much of the world unites under a multi-national government. This New Age marks the end of man’s separatist ways, and anyone who is unwilling to surrender their heritage for the greater good is an outlaw, to be systemically hunted down and exterminated.”

“Choose to join the rebellion and fight the enemy against all odds, or join the world’s most lethal military machine as it sets out to eradicate the opposition from the face of the planet. Battles occur in real-world locations, with fast-paced customizable vehicle combat and friendly squad Artificial Intelligence. A random sub-mission system provides a unique experience every time a map is played, framing online and offline gameplay rich with content and impressive level design.”

In September 2005, Gamecloud interviewed Garland Wong, one of the co-founders of Boanerges, about what the game was supposed to be:

“The game takes place in a time known as the End of Days. A great leader known as the Antichrist will emerge and form a treaty with Israel. The world will think the Antichrist is a good person but 3 1/2 years into this treaty he will break the covenant with Israel and declare himself to be God. He will force people to worship him by taking the mark of 666. You won’t be able to buy food or work or function in his society if you don’t take the mark. The Christians and Jews will work together to survive this time.”

“There will be various different levels that have religious significance. Some of the levels include Jerusalem, The Vatican City, Petra, and Westminster Abbey. Standard Military vehicles such as tanks, trucks, assault dune buggies will be part of it, also, with our customizable vehicles system, standard civilian vehicles can be made into weapons. There will be two teams, you can play as a Christian/Jew or as the Antichrist, and for the multiplayer, you will be able to play 32 players per server and up to 64 total including NPC.”

“Armageddon has three main unique game play features. The first is customizable vehicles in a FPS game. You will be able to retrovit civilian and military vehicles with various weapons. These vehicles retrofitted with weapons will also react very realistic physics since we are utilizing Ageia’s PhysX API and this will take advantage of the hardware accelleration. The second is squad based AI. You will be able command a bunch of AI squad members and give them commands. You can then cycle through the HUD and determine if any of your squad mates need help and take over there position. This is pretty cool for example you send one of your squad mates to complete a mission. You cycle through the camera and see he is being badly hurt or may need more “intelligence”. You can then take his place to complete the mission and he will take your place. The third is random story events. Armageddon is similar to Battlefield 2 in which you need to capture and hold control points to gather resources. However, Armageddon will inject random objectives throughout the map that are mutually opposing. For example, one random store event will be a great earthquake as unearthed the ark of the covenant. The Christian’s teams goal will be retrieve it while the Antichrist team will also be given the mission to capture it. These random store events have the side effect of playing a level different everytime so it will be less stale.”

Using the Reality Engine, the developers planned to implement next generation features such as dynamic effects like shadowing and lighting alongside realistic physics. Others features included Top-Down “Commander” view with real-time switching between squad members, special abilities such as placeable turrets and upgradeable armor.

Jesse Rapczak, the other co-founder at Boanerges, explained, on his personal website, why the game was eventually canceled:

“I was responsible for pitching the game to publishers, though many shied away due to the controversial nature of the story (a sci-fi future based on the Book of Revelation). Armageddon was in development for a year and was strongly considered by Electronic Arts, Vivendi Universal Games, and Sony Online Entertainment before it was finally picked up by Atari. Unfortunately, the game was cancelled a few months later when the publisher’s financial situation bottomed out.”

Armageddon was potentially going to be the first AAA Christian First-Person Shooter video game in the industry, even if we saw years before titles such as Super 3D Noah’s Ark, The War in Heaven, Saints of Virtue and Catechumen.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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Eternal Darkness 2 [Wii U, Xbox 360, PS3 – Cancelled]

Eternal Darkness 2 is a canceled Survival-Horror action/adventure game developed by Silicon Knights from 2009 to 2012, for Wii U, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. It was the sequel of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, released in 2002 for the GameCube.

Few information regarding Eternal Darkness 2 are currently available as the game was officially confirmed after its cancellation in an article from Kotaku, dated from October 2012, about the difficult development of what became the last game from Silicon Knights, X-Men: Destiny.

First rumor surrounding Eternal Darkness 2 came into light in November 2011 when some media hinted that the development of the game could have began on the Wii U:

Silicon Knights cuts force team to refocus on “one of its most requested titles for the next generation.”

Massive staff cuts hit the X-Men: Destiny developer Silicon Knights last week, slashing the Canadian developer nearly in half after a publisher, that remains unnamed, pulled out on a project the team was working on.

The project in question, which also remains unnamed, is still in development according to developers. A Silicon Knights spokesperson has said recently however, that “the company is currently refocusing and returning to its roots, working on one of its most requested titles for the next generation.”

While the name Eternal Darkness 2 has not been mentioned, it seems the most likely candidate for a next generation revamp and a perfect fit for the Wii U controller. Despite vast amounts of love for the original, Eternal Darkness has never seen a follow-up, but this could be the news we’ve all been waiting for.

In March 2012, the same article got a little update:

Silicon Knights boss Denis Dyack mentioned in a recent GI interview that his studio is working on their most requested game, another strong hint Eternal Darkness 2 is in development for the Nintendo Wii U.

To quote: “We’re really excited and we’re working on our next generation stuff. We’re working on an IP that’s our most requested and we’re really excited about that. We’re going back to our roots. I’m really looking forward to a point in time when we can talk about it.”

A few month later, in June 2012, another rumor came about possible cancellation for Eternal Darkness 2. Initially coming from NeoGaf’s user Shiggy, it seems that the loss of the infamous lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic Games regarding the use of the Unreal Engine 3 during the development of Too Human was the main reason.

For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a summary:

In July 2007, Silicon Knights sued Epic after experiencing issues with the development of the Unreal Engine 3 on Too Human:

According to the suit, which seems more than $75,000, Epic Games misrepresented the abilities of their Unreal Engine 3 when selling the license agreement to Silicon Knights. The suit says that Epic failed to “provide a working game engine” to Silicon causing them to “experience considerable losses.”

The developer was rumored to be experiencing problems with the Unreal Engine platform last summer, but later denied speculation it was dropping the platform and commented that the game was still “progressing very well.” Silicon Knights eventually decided to drop the Unreal engine and instead build their own, according to the suit.

Silicon also claims that Epic has been “sabotaging” Silicon Knights efforts to make a game by using the money earned from their licensing deals to make their own games rather than to provide support for their engine to Silicon and other licensees.

In a nutshell, SK claims that Epic used a slicker version of their Unreal Engine for Gears of War and released a hamstringed version to SK and others, in order to show them up at E3. They also failed to release the Gears version until much more recently, SK claims. They also claim that Epic made several very specific statements about what the engine could do, but which it was never able to deliver on including the number of on-screen characters and lighting effects.

The suit is based on a dozen causes of action including fraud, negligent misrepresentation, intentional interference with contractual relations, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, breach of warranty and a violation of North Carolina’s unfair and deceptive trade practices act.

The suit also says that Epic missed the deadlines for providing both the 360 and PS3 engines. Finally, the suit alleges, the SK gave up on the engine and built their own, which is what Too Human use.

Further information regarding the contention could be viewed here:

A key point of contention is the E3 demo of Too Human, which was not well received – the suit alleges: “The final development kit for the Xbox 360 was released by Microsoft in early September, 2005, meaning that Epic was obligated to deliver a fully operable version of the Engine to Silicon Knights by no later than March, 2006.” “That delivery date is significant, since compliance by Epic would have given Silicon Knights time to prepare an appropriate demonstration version of its Microsoft Xbox 360 game, Too Human, for the very important industry trade show, E3, two months later in May, 2006.” It continues: “Epic apparently was able to achieve a very useable version of the Engine for the Xbox 360 – the version that it kept to itself, for use only on its Gears of War game (as discussed below), to the detriment of Silicon Knights and Epic’s other licensees, as set forth in more detail below. Epic’s plan to avoid its obligations and hoard all of the necessary functionalities not only harmed Silicon Knights and all of Epic’s other licensees in the industry, but also gave Epic a clearly unfair advantage in the industry.” How so? “That advantage was nowhere more evident than at E3 2006, where Gears of War was awarded “Best Game in Show” and garnered nothing but laudatory press. By contrast, Silicon Knights – one of the only other [Unreal Engine 3] developers to publicly display a playable demonstration of its game – saw Too Human roundly criticized in the videogame press for its technical problems and generally unpolished appearance. The damage to Silicon Knights caused by Epic’s misconduct was manifest, because E3 attendees were able to compare Too Human with another game running ostensibly the same game engine, Gears of War, with vastly superior results.”

Less than a month later, Epic countersued Silicon Knights for copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract:

Silicon Knights claimed that Epic breached its contract and failed to deliver a workable version of the engine on time, forcing the developer to start building its own engine for Too Human, and delaying the game in the process.

Epic has returned fire: Yesterday the company filed a motion to dismiss the original suit, and then filed its own countersuit against Silicon Knights. In its defense, Epic said that Silicon Knights failed to show that the company misrepresented the truth or ever intended to deceive the developer.

It also took issue with Silicon Knights’ portrayal of some terms in the licensing agreement. While the original suit claimed that Epic had committed to delivering a working engine for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 within six months of each system’s final development kits being sent out, the motion to dismiss claimed that Epic was obligated merely to “demonstrate” that the Unreal Engine 3 would run on the Xbox 360 by March of 2006. The motion made no mention of the PlayStation 3 deadline.

Regardless of how the judge rules on the motion, there’s also Epic’s counterclaim to sort through. In short, Epic accused Silicon Knights of trying to steal the Unreal Engine 3 technology.

“Indeed, the plain language of the Silicon Knights’ complaint makes clear that Silicon Knights wants to take Epic’s licensed technology, pay nothing for it, and use it any way it pleases,” the counterclaim reads.

According to Epic, Silicon Knights had full access to the Unreal Engine 3 code and support network for an evaluation period of roughly nine months before it entered into the license agreement. The developer also got a break on the regular licensing fee because it committed to use the engine exclusively for all of its Xbox 360, PS3, and PC games.

As such, Epic accused Silicon Knights of breaching the contract by creating its own engine for Too Human and developing the game–and a second game with Sega–using that new engine. Additionally, Epic sued the developer for copyright infringement because Silicon Knights said in its original suit that the new Too Human engine was based on Unreal Engine 3.

Epic said the new engine is an unauthorized, derivative work that violates its licensing agreement and constitutes a misappropriation of its trade secrets. It also noted in the months prior to the countersuit that Silicon Knights accessed “virtually all” of the Unreal Engine 3 documentation that Epic makes available to partners online, “consistent with an effort to archive documentation for use outside the scope of the license agreement.”

Epic is seeking damages in excess of $650,000, as well as an order that any code or games that infringe on its copyright be destroyed. Only Silicon Knights’ next project after Too Human–the as-yet-unannounced game to be published by Sega–is referenced directly in the copyright-infringement claim.

The case was settled only in May 2012 with a victory for Epic Games:

Epic Games Wins Lawsuit Against Silicon Knights, Awarded $4.45 Million

Epic Games secured a significant victory today against Canadian company Silicon Knights when a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina found in favor of Epic on all claims.

The jury rejected Silicon Knights’ claim that Epic breached its Unreal Engine 3 license agreement with Silicon Knights. The jury also found in Epic’s favor on all of its counterclaims, namely that Silicon Knights breached the license agreement, misappropriated Epic’s trade secrets, and infringed Epic’s copyrights in the Unreal Engine 3 code. The jury awarded Epic damages totaling $4.45 million. Epic has 30 days in which to file a request to the court for reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and costs. The court previously had thrown out Silicon Knights’ fraud claims after nine days of testimony.

Now let’s go back to what really interests us here, with the rumor emanating from NeoGaf concerning the potential cancellation of Eternal Darkness 2. Here is what we could read on this subject in June 2012, only a dozen days after Silicon Knights lost its lawsuit against Epic:

In the wake of Epic’s victory in the Unreal Engine suit brought by Silicon Knights, Nintendo has apparently opted to halt development of Eternal Darkness 2. NeoGAF user Shiggy offers a summary of the situation, excerpts of which appear below.

“Last year, Silicon Knights and Nintendo started to work together once again on a new title. Based on the fact that they already had Wii U dev kits and also based on Dyack’s comments, it was Eternal Darkness 2.”

“So as already mentioned, the studio was solely dependent on Nintendo’s goodwill since late November 2011. But then the trial against Epic took place last week, and SK lost it. SK was ordered to pay 4.5 mio USD to Epic, and additionally they may need to pay for Epic’s legal fees. The company’s debt rose to a new level.”

“When Nintendo saw that they would need to pay an additional 10 million USD to have the company survive that develops the game, they didn’t seem to like it, especially as they wouldn’t get anything in return.”

“NCL reviewed its decision and it appears as if Eternal Darkness 2 is cancelled for now. Hence, many of the 40-man team were laid off, leaving the studio in limbo now.”

Needless to say, neither Nintendo nor Silicon Knights have commented on this issue one way or the other, and it is a distinct possibility that Shiggy’s appraisal is a hoax rather than a rumor. That said, and despite the absence of any corroborating evidence whatsoever, Shiggy’s description is eminently believable, and may prove to be entirely factual.

It is indeed difficult to know if this rumor coming from NeoGaf is to be taken seriously, even today. By the way, user Shiggy also shared some potential information regarding another cancelled Silicon Knights game which was The Crucible: Evil Within.

But whether this is true or not, the Kotaku article mentioned at the beginning of this article remains the real official source confirming that Eternal Darkness 2 was in development for a certain period:

All eight interviewees that I spoke with for this story say Silicon Knights was splitting its team between work on X-Men: Destiny, and work on a development demo.

What could it be? Too Human 2, perhaps, which Dyack has repeatedly promised that the studio intends to complete as a trilogy? Or perhaps the same Sega-funded project which was cancelled in 2009; a game code-named The Box, and later, The Ritualyst?

The answer is far more exciting: Eternal Darkness 2, which Kotaku can reveal that SK was working on in parallel to the Activision contract.

“SK didn’t take the development of X-Men: Destiny seriously the entire time I was there,” a source says. “They were working on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo that they could take to publishers. While I was there, they were even siphoning off staff from my team to work on it. Denis is not an X-Men fan either, so he didn’t care much for the license. To him, it seemed more like a job to get us by, until ED2 could be developed and sold to a publisher—which never happened.”

Another source said that “SK had about 60% of the development team working on X-Men: Destiny and the other 40% working on ED2. (…) This 60%/40% staffing estimate was backed up by multiple sources.

Yet despite this reportedly split effort, the ED2 demo also failed to come together in a satisfying way, sources said. “The farthest they got with it when I left SK was, literally, one two-level church interior,” says one former employee. “It was really bad, as I recall. It took the side-team a long time to even get that far. Bad tech, combined with a team composed of people who had not shipped a title since Metal Gear really hurt that demo. Other than that, I can’t explain why things went so poorly for them [except that] a lot of key people responsible for the original Eternal Darkness are long gone.”

The result coming from the loss of that lawsuit was a total disaster for Silicon Knights: all projects in development were definitively cancelled: The Sandman, Siren in the Maelstrom, Too Human 2 and 3 or even the mysterious King’s Quest alongside the already mentionned The Crucible: Evil Within and this Eternal Darkness 2. Denis Dyack left the studio in July 2012 to found Precursor Games with other former members of the company, while the rest were laid off. As of 2013, only 5 employees were still working within the studio:

Too Human developer Silicon Knights, still battling a $4.45 million judgment that favored Epic Games, is down to just a few employees, has closed its office and has sold off office equipment and game assets, Polygon has learned.

The company laid off most of its employees last summer, a source tells Polygon. Around the same time, a core group of Silicon Knights employees, including founder Denis Dyack, created a new studio: Precursor Games.

Precursor Games, formed about 30 miles west of the now-empty offices of St. Catharines, Ontario-based Silicon Knights, also purchased some of Silicon Knights’ assets, including art assets, desks, chairs and even computers, a move that spurred an examination by Epic Games attorneys, according to court records. The studio is attempting to fund development of Shadow of the Eternals, a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness.

Precursor Games CEO Paul Caporicci told Polygon that Precursor has no relationship with Silicon Knights, but did verify that new studio purchased some of the old studio’s equipment.

“Silicon Knights was selling off extra assets to laid-off employees and we, along with others, purchased some of them,” Caporicci said. “Like so many others who have been laid off in this difficult economy, we are simply trying to turn a tough situation into something positive. This helps gives us an opportunity with Shadow of the Eternals to give the gamers something that have been wanting.”

Shadow of the Eternals was put on-hold after two failed attempts on Kickstarter.

In December 2012, NeoGaf’s member Mama Robotnik wrote a post-mortem of Silicon Knights and shared many pictures supposedly from various cancelled projects made by the studio. Regarding Eternal Darkness 2, it seems that the game was planned for Wii U, but also on Xbox 360 and PS3:

At least one portfolio website of a former Silicon Knights concept artist seems to make reference to the project suggesting that the ambition was for a 360/PS3/WiiU release.

How this multi-format release would have worked – given Nintendo’s ambiguous partial ownership of the Eternal Darkness IP is unclear. Regardless, with X-Men Destiny a critical and commercial bomb, and reportedly only five employees remaining in the once hundreds-strong organisation, Eternal Darkness II is almost certainly utterly cancelled.

Some of those alleged renders could be from different games by Silicon Knights. For instance, this one can be seen in the gameplay video of Shadow of the Eternals, the cancelled spiritual successor of Eternal Darkness:

Same thing with this one which apparently was more related to The Crucible: Evil Within/The Box/The Ritualyst:

Besides this whole bunch of cancelled games, Silicon Knights had a lots of released stuffs that saw contents being cut in the end or stuck in development hell: Too Human began its development intially in 1997 on the Playstation and the Sega Saturn, with a totally different setting. The game moved onto the GameCube in 2000, before being put on-hold and released in 2008, exclusively on Xbox 360. Eternal Darkness was first planned for the Nintendo 64, before being released for the GameCube, and X-Men: Destiny apparently started as “a massive sandbox area with navigation puzzles and next to no combat powers or abilities” with also some features being dropped in the final product.

History seems to be repeating itself today for Denis Dyack: after Shadow of the Eternals was put on-hold following two failed attempts on Kickstarter, Precursor Games closed its doors in September 2013. He founded Quantum Entanglement Entertainment in October 2014 with the ambition to relaunch the development of Shadow of the Eternals and make it a crossmedia movie license. No information regarding what happened during a period of more than 3 years has been disclosed to date. Finally, today, Dyack is at the head of Apocalypse Studios, since January 2018, which has been developing Deadhaus Sonata for more than 4 years now, claimed to be a spiritual successor to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. The game initially used Amazon‘s Lumberyard Engine before switching to Unity in April 2022. Xbox One and Playstation 4 versions were also apparently planned, but given the evolution of the console market with now the Xbox Series S/X and the Playstation 5 as its successor, it’s clearly not impossible for these releases to be cancelled.

Potential concept arts and 3D models for Eternal Darkness 2. Still to be confirmed, might be from other cancelled Silicon Knights games.

Official artworks/concept arts from Eternal Darkness 2 – circa 2009. All provided by Jonathan Standing.