As we can read on giantbomb.com, FX Fighter is a cancelled fighting game, used to promote the PC-FX and it’s graphical capabilities. A demo was shown at the Tokyo Toy Show in 1994. The game was a 1-on-1 3D fighter which used FMV to represent the characters movement. The game was cancelled halfway through development with only 3 or 4 characters done because the sheer size of the FMVs needed to complete the game exceeded the capacity of a single CD.
You can watch a couple of videos below, one taken from a promotional video made by NEC to promote the then brand-new system (shared by Dosunceste), another from AssemblerEx YT Channel.
Black & White is a god / strategy game developed by Lionhead Studios and published by Electronic Arts and Feral Interactive in 2001 for PC. The project was in development till 1997 / 1998 and in the gallery below you can see some early screenshots, taken from various target renders, prototypes, tech demos and beta versions. The initial concept for Black & White was centered around teaching to an AI character, an idea that evolved into the god’s creatures that can be raised in the final game. As we can read on GameSpot:
The initial idea was to have a little boy or girl that you would raise and teach. The artificial intelligence would have to be incredible, letting you teach your titan how to autonomously operate in the world of Eden. For Peter Molyneux, the titan gave him the chance to bring back memories of his childhood, when his action figures would tower over the ants in the sandpit. “The amazing thing about the titan,” explains Barnes, “is the idea that it would start at the size of a villager and grow to the size of a mountain.” By the end of the game, players would have their own King Kong. […]
With only three months of work under Lionhead’s belt, Molyneux set off in June of 1998 to attend E3 in Atlanta, Georgia. There, in a makeshift room on the show floor, he unveiled the game’s concept. For each game he creates, Molyneux first builds a “test bed” version, which is the basic gameplay stripped of the usual accoutrements of fancy graphics and sound. For Black & White’s test bed, the environment was an isometric green wireframe world; each villager was represented by a little pixel on the screen. […]
Fingers crossed or not, in addition to showing off the 143,000 lines of code in the test bed version, Molyneux unveiled picturesque 3D renders of what he hoped the final game would look like. One of the renders even featured the horned reaper from Dungeon Keeper as a stand-in for the titan. […]
“The nanosecond I have a hand slap a human titan, it just changes everything,” explains Molyneux. “It’s OK to slap a little monkey–people don’t wince at that–but if you are slapping a little girl, it’s just not OK.” In addition, the team realized that the amount of AI a player would expect from a human creature would far outweigh what was possible. Thus, human titans were dropped from the game and replaced by a menagerie of anthropomorphic creatures ranging from sheep and lions to turtles.
As we can read on Wikipedia, Vanguard Princess is a Japanese indie 2D fighting game for Windows PC, developed by a single programmer / illustrator called Tomoaki Sugeno and a supposedly ex-Capcom employee. As posted by Megalol in our U64 Forum, Tomoaki Sugeno has shared a lot of beta materials, canceled characters concepts, stages and old sprites in his blog!
Masters Tournament Augusta was a golf game developed by T&E Soft and planned PC-FX. After witnessing the PC-FX failure in the japanese market T&E Soft decided to cancel the game. Only a single image was found in CD Consoles issue 5.
The Witcher is a book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. In 1997, a video game based on these books was in development for PC by Polish team, Metropolis Software, but this version of the game was never released for reasons unknown. In 2008, Metropolis were acquired by CD Projekt, a Polish company that in 2007 published the acclaimed The Witcher action RPG, which later became one of the most popular and successful RPG series in Europe and North America.
The Witcher 1997 by Metropolis Software was a completely different game from The 2007 Witcher project by CD Projekt RED. It was merely a coincidence that CD Projekt happened to purchase a studio that was working on a cancelled game of the same name. The Witcher 1997 would have been an ambitious action RPG with a big 3D world to explore filled with quests to complete and branching paths based upon decisions made during the story; aspects that also featured in the 2007 game.
We can speculate that Metropolis could possibly have encountered some issues in realising a large scale 3D open world RPG of this nature, as all their other games released from 1992 to 1998 were in 2D. It’s also possible that they simply were unable to find the backing of a publisher.
In 2009, CD Projekt closed Metropolis Software whilst they were working on a new FPS titled “They“.
An article about The Witcher by Metropolis Software was published in EDGE magazine issue #50.
Thanks to Celine and Roninakuma for the contribution!
This website uses cookies to improve your experience, by continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to the use of cookies. Find out more about cookies.Hide
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
![The Witcher (1997 version) [PC – Cancelled]](https://www.unseen64.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/the-witcher-cancelled-670x300.jpg "The Witcher (1997 version) [PC – Cancelled]")
