Katana is the WIP project name of a cancelled game that was pitched for the Xbox in 2002, by Tosym Corporation (?). In january 2009 a government agent has accidentally leaked several gigs of personal, business and government files: between those files, there was also the Katana game proposal. The project was probably cancelled in early development, with only few concepts done.
[…] the Japanese bureaucrat opened several well-known trojans that are often embedded in files found in filesharing programs Winny or Share, which upload and distribute files to uploaders specified by the virus. […]
Dubbed Katana, the leaked Xbox game submission was never made and was a proposal submitted back in 2002 under a company the agent previously ran. The proposed game is cringe worthy Final Fantasy-esque RPG stuff, complete with some hooky story involving nine stories, 100-player online multiplayer duel, and the possibility of having Janne Darc, Jack the Ripper, Ned Kelly, Musashi Miyamoto and Bruce Lee battle each other.
As we can read on wikipedia, Crash Twinsanity is an platform game developed by Traveller’s Tales and published by Vivendi Universal for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. It was released in North America on October 2004, while a Nintendo GameCube version was planned but canceled for undisclosed reasons. In the videos below you can see removed and different parts from Crash Twinsanity beta version, as the lost level “Gone a bit coco”. If you can notice more beta differences, please let us know!
Thanks to Retroguy205 for the contribution!
Videos:
The music for the removed level, Gone a Bit Coco, can also be heard in the video below.
Turok 2008 is a FPS for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with very stunning and exciting cutscenes. The player takes part in the military operation which occurs on a planet populated with dinosaurs. While it’s a first person shooter, Turok features a lot of third person moments, creating original and unique gameplay experience. It uses Unreal Engine 3. It was developed by Propaganda Games.
PC version of the game’s folders TurokGame\Baked and TurokGame\Live contain beta / unused maps. It’s possible to get the maps to load in game by copying these folders to TurokGame\Content\Maps folder. After that it’s required to remove the .u files from the Baked folder, otherwise the game will not launch.
The beta / unused maps can be loaded from the game console with the open command. Most of them contain only few brushes or a black room, or crash the game. But there are exceptions: developers’ test maps and prototypes of the game content.
L02_06 map contains early version of the jungle. There’s some of the game’s early content.
Lv02_htest and Lv02_c seem to be terrain testmaps.
First three maps shown in the second video are testmaps from TurokGame\Content\TurokDLC1 folder, other two are from Baked. The last one, LV_15_WB, contains very early prototypes of the game content.
RaptorTest map is an early prototype of the jungle.
Third video shows bunch of testmaps from Live folder. One of them contains unused tyrannosaur.
It’s possible to view Turok’s packages with the viewer which you can get here. Thanks to this program, we can see beta / unused models from the game.
It is also worth mentionning that Nathan Cheever, who was Assistant Lead Level Designer until January 2007 on the game, wrote on his personal website that Turok 2008 had some cut contents during its development:
(…) As you can guess, Turok went through the typical growing pains a new company, team, and title goes through. It was originally a longer, more diverse action game. When I arrived, it was titled Turok: Rebirth. The subtitle was eventually dropped to mark it as a true relaunch of the franchise.
Other changes included reducing most of the vehicle levels, as well as an ongoing companion. Lil was a young survivor Turok had to protect throughout the story, much in the same way Ripley protected Newt in Aliens. Companion AI and gameplay diversity were the reasons she was removed from the final game. You can still dig through the game assets and find her model, however.
The project was a valiant effort for a new, robust FPS experience with a long-standing franchise. The young team, company, and scope of the game was too much at the time to find the right mix to make Turok a high-ranking game. Licensing the Unreal Engine 3 at the time had its own share of woes as well. Disney needed the game released and the team had to make things work within the allotted time.
WWE Titans: Parts Unknown is a cancelled wrestling game, which was in development at Next Level Games (best known for Super Mario Strikers and Punch-Out for Wii) during 2004. It was planned for release on the Playstation 2 and Xbox. This 1 vs. 1 fighter was cancelled for unknown reasons by its publisher, THQ.
It appears the game never fully entered development and was subject to cancellation fairly early on. It’s possible a prototype for it was created at one point, although no media of one has ever been recovered. It seems that Next Level developed a proposal to take WWE games in a very different direction, but the pitch was shot down by THQ. A variety of concept images from the planned game have since been unearthed from the blogs of former Next Level Games artists.
Titans attempted to add a bold, new spin on the formula of previous WWE games. Its art style was very different from the norm of the series, featuring exaggerated character designs and more cinematic locales for its stages.
The level settings of WWE Titans were varied and diverse, in comparison to other wrestling games. They ranged from urban environments, like the rooftops of a sprawling city, to the top of an old castle in a desolate, snowy wilderness. It appears that some of the individual wrestlers had arenas dedicated to them, as one of the concepts is labelled “Cena Stage”.
Alongside a number of established wrestlers, the team also experimented with its own original cast members made for the game. In one of the drawings created for the project, we can see they played around with the idea of adding anthropomorphic warriors, based upon animals like crocodiles and bears; in addition to sorcerer characters.
Aside from the stylised look of Titans, there remains little information available on its planned gameplay mechanics. One big feature we have been able to ascertain is destructible environments, which appear to have been one of the title’s key focuses. Work made by one of Next Level’s artists detailed how players would have been able to destroy the walls around the castle arena.
True Crime: Hong Kong is a sandbox action game that was in development by United Front Games and was to be published by Activision. It was going to be the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series, but in February 2011, Activision announced that the game had ceased production along with their Guitar Hero franchise. The game was declared cancelled for being “just not good enough” to compete in the open world genre. Activision didn’t expect it to generate enough profit and stopped development. “True Crime: Hong Kong was playable from start to finish and ‘virtually complete’ in terms of content before Activision canned it,” the developer behind the game told CVG. [Info from Wikipedia] In February 2012, it was announced that True Crime: Hong Kong will go trough some changes and it will be released by Square Enix as a different game, named “Sleeping Dogs”.
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