red steel

Red Steel 2 [Wii – Prototype / Beta]

Red Steel 2 is the presumed sequel for the famous FPS that was released for the Wii in 2006, a project that was in development at Ubisoft Paris / Montreuil (this studio was also responsible for Red Steel 1) in 2007. It seems that these screens and documents were taken from an early, different concept of the project, some of which are from a set of “fantasy themed levels” (maybe for bonus missions or multiplayer modes).

Development of this Red Steel 2 prototype was stopped in October 2007 when Ubisoft raised concerns about the game’s quality. Since then, Ubisoft Paris started from scratch and a “new” Red Steel 2 is planned for a release in 2009. Ubisoft Montreuil went on with making Rayman Raving Rabbits 2 and TV Party.

Thanks to Hey Hey & SG for their contributions!

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Project Katana / Red Steel [Beta / Prototype]

Red Steel is a FPS published by Ubisoft for the Nintendo Wii, created by the Ubisoft Paris studio and released on November 19, 2006 in North America. Red Steel was one of the first Wii games to be developed by other studios outside of Nintendo. [Info from Wikipedia]

When the game was just a concept, it was know internally as “Project Katana” and Ubisoft started to work on a  GameCube prototype, as the Wii Development Kits were still not available. Some screens from the Katana GameCube prototype build were somehow leaked thanks to Wombat on the Assembler Forum: “screenshots from the booting sequence of Project Katana ‘playing ground’. These were made prior E3 2006 and running on an standard GameCube devlopment kit, but offcource with the Wii-controller connected to it. This ‘playing ground’ was used by the makers to see how the wii-mote reacts and works.”

Additionally, some early concept arts from Project Katana can be seen in the gallery below: it’s possibile that some of those places were not used in the final game and even the protagonist’s character design seems a bit different from the final one. Also, there were some target renders released before the published game, that have a much more better graphic than the final one.

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