Jet Sprint MX is a canned water racing game that was in development at Funcom Dublin in 2001 for the original Xbox. This was going to be Funcom’s first Xbox project, based around boat racings in which you had to win various competitions in arcade and career modes. The game was cancelled only few months later, when Funcom Dublin was closed down, because the main company decided to move out of development for the Xbox to focus on PC online games.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
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Slipshod is a cancelled platform game that was in development by Electronic Arts in 2001, for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. It was supposed to launch a new platform franchise for EA (something like Crash Bandicoot or Ratchet & Clank), but sadly after some years of development, they decided to disband the team and kill the game.
One of the levels was finished and playable, but it was too easy and not much fun to play. The Slipshod team put a lot of time and effort into the artwork and the graphic engine but they did not have enough time to develope the actual game play.
The main character design and background evolved a lot during the development: named “‘Buggy”, he was originally meant to be a pizza delivery bug in a “human-sized” world, who rode a segway and was trying to save his girlfriend. After 2 years of work, EA decided to change the whole game from scratch. In another concept “Buggy” was more like a ninja bug, who had to collect scrolls. One of the last changes before the cancellation put Buggy in a “bug-sized” world, having the whole game to take place in a tree stump.
After the target of the project was changed again to create the new “bug-scaled” world, rumors of the cancellation started to pass inside the dev-team and soon after they were all reassigned to different games. EA decided that they had already put too much time and money into the development of Slipshod, and to start over would have been too cost prohibitive.
Slipshod had the potential to be a fun game, but sadly the continuous changes of perspectives and scenario ended up killing the project.
Thanks a lot to Hey Hey for the contribution and to Tyler for his help to preserve info and media from this lost game!
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12 Volt is an arcade racing game that was in development by Sproing in 2003 / 2004 for the Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube. The game was set in slot-car tracks and players would have been able to race their models in houses and gardens. 12 Volt looked like a mix between Re-Volt and another cancelled Nintendo 64 game, Mini Racers: it’s unknown why Sproing never released this project or how much it was completed before being canned.
Some more info can be read in the original press release:
The cars can move freely on the track, they are not bound to a specific lane or slot like conventional slot cars are! This way the game combines the look of a die-cast-racer with the feeling of a full-physics arcade rally game!
Highly realistic physics enable the player to activate toys and tools that work as weapons against other players. Imagine plunging through a heap full of marbles crashing at you in a world that really looks and feels like a childhood dream-come-true. Special magnetic rails even allow you to hook on to the inner side of hairpins and drive through them at full speed!
A GBA version was planned (and cancelled) too, but they did not even show any screens from this portable version.
Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!
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2 Finger Heroes is a canceled beat ’em up made by Arkedo studios that was supposed to be played with the Natal, the Xbox 360 “play without a joypad” add-on. From the concept arts, we can see that the characters were controlled using the fingers o with some basic gestures, like folding your arms.
An interesting project, which like the other Arkedo games also displayed an original graphic style (as seen in the concept arts below) and a twisted story.
Unfortunately in the end the game got shelved because of development issues. As we can read on NeoGAF:
“One of the designs flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France, could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities..”
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Heist (HEI$T) is a cancelled action game that was in development by inXile Entertainment and would have been published by Codemasters for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. The game was to be set in San Francisco, California, circa 1969, where the players would have been able to control a group of criminals as they perform various thefts. In January 2010 Codemasters announced that the game had been officially cancelled, as we can read on CVG:
“After a much extended development period, Heist has been terminated as a project and removed from our release schedule,” a Codemasters spokesperson told CVG.
“Codemasters is focusing its future portfolio on high quality titles that will, in the majority, be developed and produced by our internal studios.”
Some more info on Heist’s gameplay can be found in the original press release:
In addition to knocking off banks, each with their own set security precautions, throughout the city, players will be highly motivated to pull off further jobs. These include raiding bars, restaurants, strip clubs, armoured cars, and more in order to acquire the bigger and better tools needed to penetrate the increasingly more difficult banks.
Thanks to Robert Seddon and Landlock for the contribution!
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