‘Superman: Man of Steel’ was the last known working title of an open world action game Factor 5 were working on for Brash Entertainment, which was being based around the legendary DC comics superhero license, Superman. It was planned to be made for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. Its initial codename was ‘Blue Steel’.
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The Adversary was a new prototype in development in 2002 for XBOX and PS2 by the same team at Namco USA that worked on Kill.Switch (an average third person shooter, but with interesting and innovative “hide ‘n’ shoot” elements). The project started as another third person shooter with human soldiers, but it slowly evolved into a more complex concept, untill in the latest builds there were even robotic tanks and mechs fighting in a big city. At this time of development, the project took the new name of “City Under Siege”. The game was created with emphasis on multiplayer deathmatches and it seems that a playable multiplayer demo was even available at closed doors at E3 2004. City Under Siege could have been a fun game, but sadly it was cancelled by Namco for unknow reasons, maybe because it was too risky economically.
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It seems that this project, a beat ’em up by Jailed Games, was going to be released on the PS2 and PSP, but it was later post-poned, development started again on the Xbox 360, and finally it was cancelled in 2006.
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Black Sun was a concept for a new third person shooter / action game set in the space, that was in development by The Collective Studios in 2003. When in 2005 The Collective merged with Backbone Entertainment, BlackSun vanished without traces. The game was cancelled for unknow reasons, but probably they did not find a publisher interested in the project.
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Career Criminal is an action game that was in development at Midway Austin (formerly Inevitable Entertainment) for the XBOX 360 and PS3, but later cancelled because it was too risky economically. It seems that the game would have been about stealing jewels / other precious stuff and it was set in a sandbox world. Sadly the studio closed its doors in December 2008, laying off the entire local workforce as part of a larger, company-wide, action.
As we can read on Kotaku, the president of Midway explained that: “The Career Criminal title was a large, ambitious, open-world project. Midway management recognizes that ambitious games need extensive resources and can require lengthy development cycles with much iteration. We are willing to invest in the long run and we need to continue developing new intellectual properties. But all of our projects have to demonstrate a likelihood of success and profitability. The resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile for the Career Criminal project were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success.”
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