Beta + Cancelled Sega Video Games

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a cancelled squad-based First-Person Shooter video game developed by Check Six Studios and published by Fox Interactive and Electronic Arts, exclusively for the Playstation 2, from 2000 to 2002. It was based on the eponymous movie franchise, and was going to take place between the second and third films, with a rescue team of colonial marines and a salvage team went on a search-and-rescue mission for the missing United States Colonial Marines ship, Sulaco. It is not related to the 2013 game of the same name.

The game was officially revealed in May 2001 by EA and showed at E3. You would play as Lt. Nakamuri who could command up to 4 marines (from a pool of 12), all of which had their own personalities and skills. IGN was able to see the game in action and wrote:

Aliens: Colonial Marines pits players in a brand new story that follows the second movie in the series, Aliens. In short, the game begins as your ship discovers a drifting marine space ship floating far too close to a powerful sun that’s pulling it in at a rapid pace. Your team boards the seemingly empty ship, and then you discover a team of rogue scavengers has taken over the ship, hoping to steal equipment, food and resources of any kind. You also discover that aliens are onboard, and killing off the scavengers. As you fight off aliens and find the pilot cabin, you must redirect the vessel before it crashes into the sun.
In one of the early scenes in the game, you confront the alien queen in her egg chamber. She is laying hundreds of alien eggs, and when she notices you, she breaks off from her birthing carapace, and begins chasing you through the ship.
It is a squad-based game in which players can determine the shape of their squad, by simply pressing a button. There are several different configurations, among them a few shaped in a square, a dome, and a triangle, and the squad walks with you and protects you from rogue alien attacks.
The game is remarkable similar to Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation in its pace and look. Players don’t zip around the game like a standard FPS. Instead, you walk around, paced and are constantly on the lookout for alien attacks, which run out of different corridors in front and behind you when you least expect it. Many aspects of the movies have been incorporated into this game, including set design and sound. As you walk through the corridors, knocked out humans, incased in alien goo are strung up along the walls, some dead, and some still living. You can actually save the live ones, who will then join your squad. They will stay with you throughout the game, unless you are unlucky, in which instance they bear little baby aliens from their chest. Then you’re in trouble. (…)
The game moves a slow framerate right now, but the controls were imminently better than in Alien Resurrection, with quick response and rapid turnaround times. I was glad to finally play a game that played like the movies, and that is also good. Now they just have to speed the game up to 60 fps, speed up and tune the controls and work story-based scripts into the game, hopefully like in Half-Life of Red Faction, and they’ll have a hit on their hands.

Initially scheduled for a release in Fall of 2001, the title was pushed back to a release somewhere in Spring of 2002 and then for November of the same year, before being put on-hold by EA in May 2002. It was officially cancelled in October 2002 with EA citing that “there were no plans to pick up its development in the future”. The project was far from complete but no reason were given about why it was cancelled back then. In October 2018, Wumpagem got an interview from former Game Director Joel Goodsell. He explained briefly that Aliens: Colonial Marines was cancelled for technical issues:

Check Six also had a contract for an Alien Colonial Marines game being worked on simultaneously with Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. The game had some amazing lighting – on the order of what we see in Alien: Isolation or Dead Space – way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, performance and production issues killed that title.

It wasn’t until 2020-2021 that more lights were shared about the game thanks to a short investigating documentary by Youtuber Mr. FO1. AVPGalaxy repeated the words from developers Clancy John Imislund, Jamien McBride and Franck de Girolami:

I was a junior programmer for a short period of time on the project. When they were doing the concept, there were other kinds of brand new Xenomorphs and you would have to fight them in the game. Check Six was just too small of a company to make a game as big as Colonial Marines. Spyro: Enter the Dragon was basically funding the game. – Jamien McBride
I was a graphics artist at Check Six and did some work on Aliens and Spyro. I left after a couple of months because of how stressful the work schedule was. The codebase was very difficult to work in. – Franck de Girolami
Check Six got a deal with Maya and they were told to write a SDK for Maya so people can write games. When I started work, I was told to work on Aliens Colonial Marines instead of the SDK. I told the team at Check Six that it was terrible and broken and it needed to be documented so people could work on it. This caused some issues with Maya as four companies bought the SDK and returned it as it wasn’t documented. It was 70% done and the 70% that was, was terrible, slow, buggy and it crashed all the time.
One time, Check Six went to Fox with a DVD they’d burnt. It was a sequence showing the Queen and it worked perfectly prior to the visit. When they showed them the video, the Queen appeared but she was half faded. An explosion occurred which was faded because the shaders were buggy.
The last time they went to Fox, they burnt another DVD of the intro video which worked fine before that. When they showed Fox, the video plays and the game just crashes. You could make out a human character on the screen but the textures weren’t loading and it was about to have some dialogue when the video crashed. This was a surprise to Fox as they’d visited Check Six before and thought the game was looking great. It was at this point, Fox just cancelled the project altogether. – Clancy John Imislund

According to some developers, the game was broken into levels and was mission-based. There were three main acts in the game, and each one was made up of about seven levels. The first act took place on the USS Sulaco. It was hinted that the final act would take place on the aliens’ home planet. There were flamethrowers, pulse rifles with grenade-launcher attachments, and the shoulder-mounted smart gun. As for the aliens, alongside Facehuggers, Chestbursters, Warriors and Praetorians, new types were planned.

Although not related, it is worth mentionning that the second Aliens: Colonial Marines game, this time published by SEGA and initially made by Gearbox Software, also went into development hell as it was announced too soon, in December 2006. Gearbox worked briefly on it until the beginning of 2008 before being focus on the first Borderlands, which was itself modified from its initial form, before SEGA temporarly put on-hold the project in 2009 because of the economical crisis. The development was re-launched in the end of 2010 with TimeGate Studios as the main developer.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

Images:

Images from the Gearbox Software prototype – circa 2008:

Videos:

2008 teaser from the Gearbox Software’s version

N-Gage, Others

Alien Front [N-Gage – Cancelled]

monokoma

01-05-2021

1 Comment

The original Alien Front is an arcade game developed by Sega, which was then ported to the Dreamcast in 2001, adding online multiplayer. In 2004 Sega announced another port of the game for the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage, as we can read on IGN:

“In Alien Front, you can take on the role of an army tank commander to defend the Earth against invading aliens, or switch sides and take command of a futuristic 2-leg walker, a 4-leg spider walker, or an anti-gravity hovercraft vehicle. Alien Front also has a two-player deathmatch mode via Bluetooth wireless technology and the possibility to share game statistics with the world via the N-Gage Arena.”

As many other games planned for this phone-console hybrid, Alien Front was later cancelled. In 2019 a playable prototype was found and released online.

Images:

Videos:

GameCube, Nintendo

Buciyo 5 (The Bumbling 5) [GameCube – Cancelled]

monokoma

25-08-2020

No Comments

In only about 4 years of existence, United Game Artists managed to become one of the most original and beloved Sega teams ever existed, especially for Dreamcast fans. Originally founded as Sega AM9 and led by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, they had a portfolio of released games composed of just 2 new Dreamcast titles and a sequel (Space Channel 5 – 1999, Rez – 2001, Space Channel 5 Part 2 – 2002). UGA were for sure a talented and inventive studio.

Blending catchy music with beautiful, sometimes abstract 3D visuals, both Space Channel 5 and Rez are now considered cult classics and often used as examples to show how games can really be art. Synesthesia, the phenomenon felt when multiple senses are activated after the stimulation of a different one, was an inspiration and a game design objective for the United Game Artists team, mixing graphic, audio and gameplay so as to suscitate an abundance of feelings and sensations.

It’s easy to imagine how new games from UGA would have been acclaimed by their fans, but unfortunately things didn’t go as planned. After Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in March 2001, United Game Artists and the other Sega teams started working on the competitor’s consoles, creating new titles and porting their old classic or unfinished games to Xbox, Playstation 2 and Gamecube. In the following months some members of UGA worked on ports of Rez and Space Channel 5 for PS2, while the rest of the team started developing two new projects: Rez 2 and Buciyo 5.

Buciyo 5 (somehow translated as The Bumbling 5) was the new, original project by UGA planned to be a Gamecube exclusive, but not much was ever revealed about it. Sega quietly announced the game in January 2003 as a “New Project by United Game Artists” along with other titles such as F-Zero GX by Amusement Vision and Skies of Arcadia Legends by Overworks. At the time Jake Kazdal was the only American working directly at UGA on Space Channel 5 and Rez as an artist, animator and designer, and he was one of the few members of the original group behind Buciyo 5.

Jake was featured in an article published in January 2014 by Edge Magazine: “After completing Rez, Kazdal worked on a GameCube adventure for a year, a prototype that was never released”. Still without knowing much more about Buciyo 5, in 2016 when we were working on our book we got in contact with Jake, who helped us to preserve some more memories about this UGA’s lost masterpiece. He told us that:

“After Rez shipped, the rest of the Rez team went into a sort of discovery mode on what they would do with a Rez 2, and if that was even going to happen, they wanted to wait a bit and see how sales were. I was a big fan of my first director at Sega, Takashi Yuda, who was the creator and director of Space Channel 5. I had worked under him for my first year at Sega in Tokyo on that project and was just a big fan of his game design theory and style in general. He was starting a small team to prototype an idea for an action / adventure on Gamecube, so I asked to join him for a time, while the Rez team figured out what they wanted to do for the next project.”

According to the information we managed to gather, we imagine Buciyo 5 (which roughly translates to “The Bumbling 5”) as a mix between Mega Man, Metal Gear Solid, Pikmin and Ape Escape 3. Sounds interesting? It sure does.

Players would have been able to choose between 5 red robots, visually somewhat in the vein of Mega Man in terms of cute robotic characters with human-like faces. Each robot had a different peculiarity: voice, eyes, nose, ears, and brain. This would have allowed different gameplay mechanics and approaches to the game’s levels, as explained by Jake:

“So one [robot] could mimic voices exactly, one could see really well, one could smell really well, one could hear really well, and one was a genius. You would use these 5 together to infiltrate enemy bases and take on the enemies as carefully as possible. They also had plungers on their heads, and you could jump on an enemy head-first, and flip him around with your plunger head! Or jump onto the ceiling and hold still as enemies walked underneath you, etc. It was pretty slapstick, and really cute, had a jamming soundtrack and was Yuda-san’s brainchild that we cranked on for a while”.

The Buciyo 5 team first created a concept video to internally pitch the game to Sega HQ – and it was a success: the project was greenlighted and they started working on a prototype. Once Rez 2 was officially abandoned – as the first one didn’t sell enough to warrant a sequel – more developers switched to Buciyo 5 and in about a year they were able to create an awesome playable demo, showcasing all the main features of the game and its unique style. Jake remembers:

“[…] working late nights, putting together a badass gameplay demo that was beautiful, super interesting and quirky, and designed by a bunch of *really* intelligent, talented game designers who really believed in the project. “ […] “It was at this time that I decided to move away from animation and really start focusing on environmental art, and Yuda-san had worked on all these Genesis era classics like Castle of Illusion and others, and I was stoked to be able to study with someone of that pedigree. We looked at a lot of classic Disney films for lighting and composition reference, and I fell in love with pre-production and concept painting during this project.”

Unfortunately, as it often happens with the most original and interesting games, marketing decisions were going to kill off the project. Mike Fischer, VP at Sega America at the time, went to Japan to evaluate new Sega games for the American market and was not interested in a quirky, cute adventure game, like Buciyo 5 definitely was. Sega Japan said they would have stopped financing the project if the American branch wouldn’t publish it in that area. So the plug was pulled: Buciyo 5 became another unseen game we’ll never play.

Of course United Game Artists were crushed when their last dream game was canned too. Rez 2 never made it past the pitch video phase, but Jake remembers “It was *sick*. Yokota-san, the art director of Rez, (and Rez 2, and Panzer Dragoon Saga) is a genius and it was an evolution of Area 5 from Rez. Insanity.” It seems that, at the time, there was no place for such avant-garde, experimental games at Sega.

Not long after Buciyo 5 was cancelled, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Katsumi Yokota, Ryuichi Hattori, Jake Kazdal and other key staff left the studio, and United Game Artists quickly ceased to be. Those that remained at Sega, merged with Sonic Team (and ended up working on the stylish DS games Feel The Magic: XY/XX and The Rub Rabbits!), and many of them are still there.

In October 2003 Mizuguchi founded Q Entertainment along with Yokota and other former Sega developers to keep working on interesting music game hybrids and creating projects such as Lumines, Meteos, Every Extend Extra and Child of Eden. In 2009 Jake Kazdal founded his indie studio 17-BIT (formerly Haunted Temple Studios), releasing cult-following games such as Skulls of the Shogun and Galak-Z: The Dimensional. United Games Artists will always be remembered for having continued – till the end – to create original games following their own creativity: today their unique style is still kept alive by UGA’s former members.

This article was originally published in our book “Video Games You Will Never Play”

Game Gear, Sega

Yohoden Hisuimaru: Bonten no Ken [Game Gear – Cancelled]

monokoma

25-01-2020

No Comments

Yohoden Hisuimaru: Bonten no Ken (妖逢伝ひすい丸梵天の剣) is a cancelled JRPG that was in development around 1992 – 1993 for Sega Game Gear. From screenshots and footage available we can see it was going to be a classic RPG set in feudal Japan, with the main protagonist being able to transform himself into a Tengu.

A brief description of the game was published in a Japanese website:

“A field-type RPG set in medieval Japan. The protagonist, Hasui Maru, suddenly struck by lightning and became a Tengu. Why was he transformed to this figure? Fate now waits for him. As you can see from these images, it seems that popular figures of Japanese folklore and real-life history would have appeared in the game, such as Momotaro, Kintaro, Ushiwakamaru and Benkei.”

Combat was turn-based and there was a nice-looking overworld map to explore. It seems the project was being produced by Sega and it could have been a great addition to Game Gear’s japanese library. Unfortunately even if Yohoden Hisuimaru: Bonten no Ken looked quite far in development, it was quietly cancelled and soon forgotten.

Some images were found by Romanovh and VGDensetsu in old japanese magazines.

Images:

Videos:

Dreamcast, Microsoft, Sega, Xbox

Farnation (Sega) [Dreamcast, Xbox – Cancelled]

monokoma

08-08-2018

1 Comment

Farnation (sometime spelled Far Nation) is a cancelled online RPG that was going to be published by Sega, initially for their Dreamcast and later for Xbox. The game was somehow announced in mid 2000, when its title was found in a document released by Sega Enterprises discussing the company’s overall business strategy.

Some more details about the game were published in December 2000 by Gamespot:

“With its upcoming massively multiplayer network RPG, Farnation, Sega plans to take the first step in introducing the concept of persistent online worlds to the console market. Farnation gives a nod to such successful PC games as Ultima Online and – more recently – Everquest by letting players interact with other human players across a large universe.
Farnation contains five different terrains, and in these areas, you will have the ability to cooperate with other human players in building towns – complete with casinos, libraries, restaurants, hospitals, banks, and residences. Of course, you aren’t limited to these towns. You can build stations that house airships, boats, and stagecoaches so that you can travel around the entire Farnation world to advance the game’s story arcs and events. In fact, there are several special events that occur throughout the game for plot advancement and, according to Sega, to make the game easily navigable for beginning players.
However, Farnation’s emphasis is on human interaction. Communicating through the use of the game’s chat function, you can buy, sell, and trade items with others. You can also form parties and head out in search of battles and adventure. In total, the game’s play modes include party battles, simultaneous online battles, weapon and item creator, town development, and story elements.
Aside from its gameplay features, Farnation looks to be one of the most visually impressive massively multiplayer online RPGs on the market. After briefly seeing the game in action, we came away thoroughly impressed with the amount of detail in the characters and environments, particularly in the towns. In one scene, there were at least a dozen generously modeled polygonal characters onscreen at once, and the environments were cluttered with several building structures and residences. Graphically, Farnation is favorably comparable to the currently available online RPGs for the PC platform.”

While the Gamespot Staff was able to take a look at the game, unfortunately Sega never officially released any image or footage to the public. From what we can read in this preview, it sounds the game would have been an original mix between Sim City and a traditional MMORPG.

In February 2001 on Dreamcast Magazine Issue 19 Farnation was named again in a list of future Dreamcast games. On March 2001 Sega discontinued the Dreamcast, restructuring itself as a third-party publisher. Many Sega games in development were then moved to Xbox, GameCube and Playstation 2. In May 2001, Gamespot kinda confirmed that Farnation was then in development for Microsoft’s Xbox.

Still Sega did not shown anything from the game, not even officially announce its release. After a while Farnation vanished forever and the only proof we have of its existence is a prototype seen at the Sega of America office, in a photo they published on Flicker in July 2008.

Between many other Dreamcast games, released and unreleased, we can see a jewel case labeled “Farnation, PT-ROM 1/12/01”. This could have been an updated version of demo that Gamespot seen in December 2000.

We can only hope someone at Sega of America saved this Farnation prototype, to release it online in the future. If you know someone who worked at Sega in 2000 / 2001 and may have more details about Farnation, please let us know!