Ninety-Nine Nights is a crowd combat game that is played similarly to the likes of Dynasty Warriors/Warriors Orochi and other Musou titles. Microsoft had big plans for this game at the time, but it didn’t hit its ambitious goal largely because of how Ninety-Nine Nights veered too far from its original vision. Information about this game is scarce, but we can a couple of screenshots from an early build shown at the Tokyo Game Show 2005.
Scivelation is an obscure third-person shooter that spent years in development hell under TopWare Interactive and Black Wing Foundation. The project was first unveiled in October 2009, when TopWare announced the title alongside an interesting overview of its premise. As originally reported by IGN:
“Set in the distant future, Scivelation’s universe is a world born out of the ashes of conflict and misery. An oppressive global dictatorship, known as the Regime, has risen to power after the aftermath of the Apocalypse; aggressively seeking out and eliminating any opposition to their tyrannical government. With this capricious, dystopian reality as a backdrop, the player will take his or her place amongst the ranks of the resistance, waging war throughout the furthest reaches of the globe in this action-packed battle for freedom and survival.”
Beyond these early press releases and promotional trailers—which largely recycled the same high-level plot summary—TopWare Interactive released very little public information. Actual gameplay footage remained virtually non-existent.
Surprisingly, the game’s official product page remains live on TopWare Interactive’s website today. The listing on the website outlines the core mechanics and introduces its two primary protagonists:
Mikhael Ivanov :
Captain of GRN, Mikhael is a decorated veteran of the Tribulation War. Due to injuries sustained in combat, much of his body is made up of Zionetric implants, improving his combat skills and allowing him to evolve above the level of a simple soldier.… and Elisha Amano :
A former geneticist for the Regime, she joined the Resistance to justify her guilt for having worked on the Omega sequence of the Ascension program, a project aimed at creating a genetic panacea with the aim of curing human mortality. This program, however, was used by the Regime for much darker purposes. Elisha not only brings a brilliant scientific mind to the Resistance, but also his research…”
Now onto the gameplay features:
While these concepts looked promising on paper, TopWare never released concrete gameplay footage beyond a handful of screenshots. To add salt to the wound, the project suffered numerous delays: initially scheduled for a 2010 release, it was pushed to 2011, and eventually delayed to Q1 2014, with TopWare aiming to target PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
That target passed without a word. Following the release of Renoir in 2016, Black Wing Foundation suddenly vanished too, which ultimately meant that Scivelation was done for. Today, the project exists only as a mere publisher listing, a pre-rendered trailer, and a small collection of promotional assets you can check below.
A World in My Attic, sometimes referred as The World in My Attic, and formerly known as Incarnate, is a cancelled Third Person action Roguelike hybrid game developed by Defiant Development around 2018-2019. The game was scheduled for Q1 2021 for “all platforms” which means PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One but also could be Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S and Playstation 5.
The game was revealed during its cancellation back in July 2019 when Defiant Development announced it was ceasing development of brand new titles to focus on updates of their already shipped games: Hand of Fate and Hand of Fate 2:
The maker of the Hand of Fate deck-building/action series is “ceasing development of new titles,” saying that its approach to making games, which sustained a nine-year run, hasn’t been adaptable to a fast and ever-changing industry.
Defiant Development began in 2010 as an effort to make “a studio model in Australia that would thrive without being dependent on international ownership,” studio founder Morgan Jaffit wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “We set out without knowing where the journey will take us, and we do so knowing that the unknown is not always safe. That is a risky way to make games, and we knew that.”
(…)
“The games market has changed in ways both big and small in the nine years we’ve been in business,” Jaffitt wrote. “We have not been able to change quickly enough to continue with them.”
Jaffitt closed his remarks by linking to a video of A World in My Attic, the incomplete game the studio had been working on at the time of yesterday’s announcement.
Regarding A World in My Attic and its concept, Kotaku wrote:
The World In My Attic would supposedly follow a family as they started “a new life in a new home,” only to discover “a strange board game” there known as Hexes & Heroes. This board game would act as “a bridge to a fantastic world,” complete with the requisite fantasy tropes one might expect from a riff on the iconic Dungeons & Dragons alliteration.
Much like Defiant’s previous work on the Hand of Fate series, The World In My Attic appears to blend both tabletop strategy with action-adventure set pieces. Where the former focused on deck-building, however, the latter would presumably have featured a world created with the distinct hex pieces seen in tabletop games like Settlers of Catan. In the short preview above, a warrior-type character can be seen traversing a landscape made up of these six-sided segments and, at one point, a large orc or troll is shown being placed on the “real world” game board before it appears in the fantasy setting.
After the shutdown of Defiant Development, numerous ex-developers, including Morgan Jaffit, will found Spitfire Interactive, currently developping Hand of Fate: Hordes, planned to release this month.
Videos:
Images:
Paladin is a cancelled open world Action medieval game developed around 2007-2008 by Midway Studios Austin (formerly Inevitable Entertainment) and published by Midway Games for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms. The game was using the Unreal Engine 3.
For years, few information were available regarding Paladin as it was cancelled before being announced. On his personal website, Richie Romero, who was Art Director at Midway until the closure of the company, shared screenshots and videos to what appears to be an action game set in the medieval times with open world elements. During that period, Midway Studios Austin was split in two teams, both working on different projects: Paladin, and Career Criminal, which was cancelled in August 2008, following publisher’s huge financial loss.
While no official announcement has been made during its development, we can speculate that Paladin was cancelled back in December 2008, when the studio was closed by Midway which still faced financial difficulties:
Facing possible bankruptcy, Midway games will close its Austin studio entirely, suspend development on several unspecified titles, and reduce its workforce by 25 percent. (…) Midway did not list which projects it plans to cancel or suspend, but calls them “non-core” projects slated for 2010 and 2011 that had not yet been announced. (…)
Alongside Paladin and Career Criminal, Midway’s bankruptcy also led to the cancellations of various projects such as Stranglehold 2: Gun Runner, This is Vegas, Hero or even a new take on Mortal Kombat.
Videos:
Images:
Tork: Prehistoric Punk was a fun platformer released exclusively on the Xbox. This game was made by ex-Rayman developers and, early in development, was supposed to be a big triple-A contender against other competitors like Jak and Daxter and Super Mario. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out. Below, we can see some of the beta footage taken from the E3 2002 showcase and some press releases related to late 2003 and 2004.