Bug Blasters: The Exterminators is a cancelled on-rails shooter, made by Stargate, that was supposed to come out in 1995. Aside from being one of the most shameful rip-off of Ghostbusters ever created, there is nothing too interesting about this game: it is just a long sequence of FMVs in which you have to aim and shoot… bugs. A complete version of Bug Blasters was commercialy released in 2001 by Good Deal Games.
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Rip Squad is a cancelled driving shooter / action game that was in development from 1999 to 2001 by Midway for the Arcades. It was going to be a war-themed game, inspired by Call of Duty and a TV show called “Rat Patrol”. The gameplay featured 360° of on-screen movement, a mounted .50 cal rifle inside the cabinet and a seat with a shaker beneath it, to simulate the motion of the jeep driving over different types of terrain.
As we can read on Arcade Heroes:
Back in 2001, Midway made a decision to dump their long standing coin-op division in favor of focusing developments on console gaming. When that decision came down, there were still some arcade games floating around in the development cycle, which were subsequently canceled and were lost to the knowledge of the public.
Thanks to kieranmay for the contribution!
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Star Fox (Starwing in Europe) is a on-rail shooter developed by Argonaut Software and Nintendo EAD, published in 1993 for the Super Nintendo. Argonaut worked closely with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES. They developed a Star Fox prototype on the NES, initially codenamed “NesGlider”, which was inspired by their earlier 8-bit game Starglider, and then ported this prototype to the SNES.
Programmer Jez San told Nintendo that this was as good as it could get unless they were allowed to design custom hardware to make the SNES better at 3D. Nintendo assented to this, and San hired chip designers to make the Super FX chip, the first 3D graphics accelerator in a consumer product. [Info from Wikipedia]
Megalol found some Star Fox beta screens in Nintendo Power magazine from Jan 1993, in which we can notice a completely different (and awesome) beta title screen!
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Originally a sequel titled Star Fox 2 was in the works for the Super Nintendo, but it was never released, though a handful of ROM dumps at various stages of its development were leaked onto the internet.
Thanks to Jason for the english corrections!
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Darkside / Dark Ride is a cancelled game that was in development by Rocket Science Games for the Saturn or the 3DO. We had an old article about this in the U64 Archive, but now thanks to Celine we found some more screens from French magazine CD Consoles issue #4! We have updated the Darkside / Dark Ride page.
Darkside (sometimes written as Dark Ride or Darkride) was one of many titles being devloped by Rocket Science Games before being cancelled. It was to be a psychodellic tunnel-based game with bizarre graphics, and was briefly previewed in the December 1994 issue of Games World: The Magazine, which stated that ‘the team behind the game are perfecting the smooth scrolling of the ride… before the gameplay’.
Rocket Science Games themselves are probably more interesting than the games they made- funded by Sega Enterprises and promising more than they could deliver on, they mostly made Sega-CD and PC-based FMV based titles such as Cadillacs & Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm and Obsidian. However, their titles never sold well, and Sega themselves cancelled half of the company’s titles around 1994/95 to keep costs down- it seems Dark Side / Dark Ride was one of the victims of this. They eventually went out of business in 1997.
The preview in Games world: The Magazine states that the game was being developed for the 3DO, although almost all other RSG games were being developed for either the Sega CD or the PC- whether this is a mistake on the magazine’s part is unknown.
In a short article published in French magazine CD Consoles issue #4 we can read that “Darkside” was in development for the Saturn and the game would have took the player into an imaginary world, to explore it aboard a cart on rails (as in a rollercoaster). Could this have been an on-rails shooter? We are not sure.
As written in an article in Wired 2.11 (page 108), Rocket Science decided to cancel this project because it was too similar to other games of its time:
The trend toward more literate games means that some projects well along the Rocket Science pipeline have had to be scrapped. “We saw some things at the Consumer Electronics Show very similar to our Rocket Boy and DarkRide, so we’ve put those on hold,” says Caldwell. “But we still have Wing Nuts, a World War I dogfight game, in the works.”
If you have some more info on this game, please let us know!
Thanks to Celine for the scan! Thanks to Jason for the english corrections!
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