Dark Guns is a cancelled shooter / action game that was in development from 1997 to 1999 by a SCEA team (989 Studios?) headed by David Jaffe, planned to be released for the Playstation. The original concept was for a run and gun 3rd person shooter, but it soon evolved into a flying-shooter, in which players would had took the role of a UFO, to destroy real-life cities and abduct humans to use them for alien esperiments. A playable beta was created (as we can see from the photo of the disc, revealed by Jaffe) before they decided to stop the works on the project, because of some development and managment issues.
David Jaffe talked about Dark Guns in various interviews, that we can read on Gamespot and Gamasutra:
“I had come off Twisted Metal 2,” Jaffe said. “They gave me a blank check and said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ Anybody who was looking at $2 million–at the time that was a lot of money–to do an overhead shooter…that should have been a red flag. To have a design document that was 300 pages for anything, let alone an overhead shooter, should have been a red flag. And then being told the producer and the designer was the same person and that person was someone who had never produced a game in his life… All three of these things came up during the pitch. A number of people, including myself, should have said, ‘Let’s rethink this.”
“Everything about that game came from negativity, and after four years they pulled the plug,” he continued. “And I’m glad they did. I remember when that game was cancelled I realized, that was a huge opportunity and I blew it. No one gets that opportunity, and I wasted it. So after I did another Twisted Metal game my boss came to me and asked again, ‘What do you want to make next?’ And it was really for me a chance to do it right.”
We can only hope that in the future some Dark Guns screens or videos could be preserved too.
Images:
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Jaffe on one of his live streams did share footage of this game. Here’s a time stamp link of the game around 1:03:03. https://youtu.be/4sCUpUmvh38?t=3783
There is footage of this game on YouTube published by user Robby JVC https://youtu.be/jvVEEQpgrNo