Microsoft

The Boondock Saints: The Video Game [PC, Xbox 360, PS3 – Cancelled]

The Boondock Saints: The Video Game, sometimes referred as Boondock Saints: The Game, is a cancelled action cooperative shooter game developed by Critical Mass Interactive in 2012, for PC and Xbox 360, with a potential Playstation 3 version. It was based on the movies of the same name.

The game was first mentionned in February 2012 when cast members from the movies told to Joystiq that they would make a gaming announcement at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival 2012:

Joystiq has learned that cast members from the 1999 cult classic film The Boondock Saints will be making some manner of gaming announcement during the ScreenBurn Arcade portion of next month’s SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX. Now, whether that announcement is actually Boondock Saints related is anyone’s guess, but that seems like the logical conclusion.

Two days later, the project was officially announced by its developer, as we can read on Gamespot:

The Boondock Saints are making a comeback. Speaking to G4TV, Critical Mass Interactive president and CEO Matt Scibilia revealed that the studio is at work on a “full-on co-op shooter” based on the film for the Xbox 360 and PC.

A PlayStation 3 version of the game is possible, but not confirmed, according to the report.

Scibilia told the site that he wants Boondock Saints: The Game to ship to retail, but conceded that it is too early to tell, and the game may end up being released episodically through digital channels.

As for the story the game will tell, Scibilia said the developer is keen on “staying true to the content” of the film, but is also looking at “expanding the story.”

“The Boondock Saints characters are so strong. The banter, the relationships between Rocco and the brothers, the Catholicism, that will all be featured in the game,” Scibilia said.

Boondock Saints: The Game will be discussed by Critical Mass Interactive and the film’s actors at a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel on March 11, before a bigger reveal at the E3 2012, which runs June 5-7.

Following this, a short teaser was shown at the SXSW.

However, it was the last time that we heard of The Boondock Saints: The Video Game, as it was never showed at E3 2012 and totally disappeared after that. We can speculate that something went wrong during its development or that Critical Mass Interactive didn’t secure a publisher. It is currently hard to know if the game even reached a playable state.

It wasn’t the only cancelled game made by Critical Mass Interactive. In their beginning, the studio had planned to make a First-Person Shooter based on the comic-books franchise Sword of Dracula, dropped due to lack of publishers interested in the project. The company took the decision to focus on outsourcing during nearly an entire decade before trying again with The Boondock Saints. According to Matt Scibilia’s LinkedIn profile, studio went bust in August 2014.

If you know someone who worked on The Boondock Saints: The Video Game and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know! 

Sword of Dracula (Critical Mass Interactive) [PC, Xbox – Cancelled]

Sword of Dracula is a cancelled horror First-Person Shooter developed around 2004-2005 by Critical Mass Interactive for PC and Xbox. It was based on the eponymous comic-books franchise.

Few details are currently available about this game. According to its developers, their Sword of Dracula’s project was inspired by Call of Duty in terms of gameplay.

It was officially revealed by Critical Mass Interactive in February 2004 with a press release indicating that a demo would be showed at the Game Developers Conference the next month, thanks to Gamespot:

Critical Mass Interactive (CMI) has today announced the development of Sword of Dracula, a first-person shooter based on the Image Comics series of the same name. No release date or platforms for the game have been confirmed at this time, but CMI and the series’ creator, Jason Henderson, have stated that they plan to have a demo of the game ready for next month’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose.

“The moment we saw the Sword of Dracula comic, we knew this was the franchise to jump on,” said Critical Mass Interactive Vice President of development Billy Cain. “We’re talking a commando-vampire war in fierce, cinematic, Call of Duty-style gameplay. You could see it from the first issue. We knew we had to make this happen.”

In the Sword of Dracula comics, Dracula is portrayed as the world’s foremost terrorist, using the blood of thousands of victims to build himself a vampire army. Henderson describes his take on Dracula as “a king, a massive 300-year-old ubervampire with an army of vampires and zombies, and it’ll take every Humvee, cannon, and Blackhawk Ronnie has to bring him down.”

The character Henderson refers to as Ronnie is the character that players will assume the role of in the game, a covert agent named Veronica Van Helsing, who leads a UN-connected antivampire operation known as Polidorium.

Shortly after, HomeLAN was able to get an interview with Billy Cain, where some more informations about it’s Call of Duty approach was shared:

HomeLAN – What can you tell us about the graphics engine that the Sword of Dracula game will use?

Billy Cain – Unfortunately, we cannot make a final decision on the engine until we sign on with a publisher. Right now, we’re using Call of Duty to pre-visualize the game for potential publishers.

HomeLAN – What is the current status of the game’s progress and when will it be released?

Billy Cain – At this point, we have secured the license for all video games based upon the comic book, Sword of Dracula. We are in the process of building a demo to show publishers one way to visualize the game, and we happen to be using the Call of Duty engine, and modifying it to suit our needs. As for release dates, that will be part of our negotiations with publishers. We want to find a publisher that will give the game the time it needs in development, so that it can compete with the best games out there.

After all of this, developers went silent about the game for some months, only briefly mentionned in june of the same year by GenGamers, where we learned that they were in negotiations with different publishers:

Critical Mass Interactive´s Billy Cain sent over a few words in which he mentions that Critical Mass Interactive is still in negotiations on their upcoming FPS Sword Of Dracula with a number of publishers.

It was only in February 2005, almost a year after its official announcement, that the game was talked about again thanks to NoFrag, announcing a change of graphics engine and the addition of an Xbox version:

Without news of Sword of Dracula since last June, I contacted the developers of the game: it is still in development at Critical Mass Interactive. After its first prototype, the developer changed the engine to please some publishers interested in the project and is currently preparing a new prototype (this time on PC and Xbox) with the aim of signing a contract with a publisher. In any case, the release of the game is therefore still a long way off.

Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on Critical Mass Interactive’s side as they never managed to secure a publisher, forcing them to definitely cancel the game and refocus on outsourcing. As an outsource company, Critical Mass worked on games such as Rift, Ultima Online, Tabula Rasa and Borderlands, before disappearing. The licence was, in the end, never adapted into video games.

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Sabotage 1943/Sabotage (Velvet Assassin) [PC, PS2, XBOX – Cancelled/Prototype]

Velvet Assassin is a stealth game released in 2009 for PC and Xbox 360, developed by Replay Studios (formerly Team Toro) and published by SouthPeak Games. The title takes place during the Second World War, where player take control of Violette Summer, a British spy in the service of MI6, attempting to thwart the Nazi war effort, operating behind enemy lines. The game’s story was inspired by the real-life secret agent/saboteur Violette Szabo.

But before being released in this form, the game had two other versions, during a hectic development spanning approximately from 2002 until its release in 2009.

Sabotage 1943

In February 2003, German studio Team Toro revealed its very first game, Sabotage 1943, a First-Person Shooter whose scenario and background were identical to Velvet Assassin. It is then planned for a release during the Winter of 2003/2004 on PC, Playstation 2 and Xbox, and the press release revealed some information:

“France 1943. Behind the façade of stability a secret, desperate, and cruel war of liberation has already begun. As a spy, saboteur, and partisan of the French resistance movement, the Résistance, you will also get involved in this fight.

The omnipresent enemy keeps everything under control and reacts on every kind of resistance in a barbarous and brutal way. An open military confrontation would be a lost cause.

Therefore, another way has to be found to fight the enemy. You conspire against the Nazis, operate underground, and pretend to be a harmless civilian. This way you can deceive and infiltrate the Nazis to strike secretly. But don’t fall in the hands of the Gestapo that even plants spies in the resistance groups…”

Engine Specs

3D tactical first-person shooter with the newest technologies offers extremely realistic game visuals. Dynamic real-time light and shadow effects perfectly reflect the sinister atmosphere of the background story.

Particle system makes the explosions look extremely realistic. Environmental effects, such as dust, rain and leaves, create a dark and gloomy atmosphere.

Flexible camera control and exact details of the game world even allow the player to peek through keyholes.

Game Features

22 levels will lead you through the cruel story, which is based on true historical facts.

Scenarios in authentic French theaters of war in 1943/44, such as Paris occupied by German forces.

Seven different characters with various specific attributes

Complex enemy AI with numerous surprising behavior patterns

Various clothing and uniforms allow the player to operate secretly in military areas behind the enemy lines.

Player’s behavior has a direct effect on the relationship between the population and the Résistance (betrayal, assistance, etc.)

By skillfully sneaking up on the enemy, soldiers can be overwhelmed and forced at gunpoint to open doors and reveal vital information

When under fire, the player can fake death by using the “Playing Dead Mode” to deceive the enemy

Shortly after, the developer showed a first trailer, then, later, it was a video preview from Gamestar in April of the same year that was published.

Sabotage

However, after these revelations, the game felt into total obscurity and was not mentionned by its developer until May 2006, just after completing Crashday for Moon Byte Studios. Unsurprisingly, after almost 2 and a half years of absence, the project had undergone a complete overhaul. Simply renamed Sabotage, the title did not change context nor main character, but took the form of a Third-Person Shooter, planned exclusively on PC for 2007 and published by Anaconda, the label of DTP Entertainment. It was presented at the E3 and Game Convention 2006 shows, and it was again Gamestar that released a video preview in November of the same year, notably showing several phases of gunfights.

Early 2007 should have been the release window for Sabotage, but it wasn’t. The title would reappear briefly during the Game Convention 2007 for a release now planned in Autumn 2008, where we learned that Gamecock Media Group took over the publishing rights.

Finally, in March 2008, new changes occured for this project, now named Velvet Assassin with an Xbox 360 version in addition, it would see its main character partially redesigned, as well as its HUD. The gunfights phases that we could see in Gamestar’s preview seem to have been mostly dropped in favor of a more tactical and stealth-oriented gameplay.

Velvet Assassin would finally see the light in Spring 2009, after experiencing an additional delay and a final change of publisher with SouthPeak Games, following the acquisition of Gamecock Media Group. The game received mixed to average critical reviews and Replay Studios filed for bankruptcy in August 2009, only 3 months after its release.

During these 7 years of existence, Replay Studios seemed to have a lot of difficulty in the development of its titles. In addition to the chaotic one for Sabotage 1943, the company also had Survivor in production, a title announced in October 2004. Crashday, only available on PC since 2006, should have been released in 2005, also on Playstation 2 and Xbox. At some point, we could even read on the now-defunct Replay Studios website this:

“Sabotage 1943 is a tactical shooter game in WWII. As allied elite agent Jason Turner you perform dangerous, top-secret guerilla and sabotaging activities which officially don’t exist behind enemy lines.”

Sabotage 1943 video:

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Amon Ra (Widescreen Games) [PS2 – Prototype]

Amon Ra is a cancelled adventure game developed by Widescreen Games around 2003, exclusively for the Playstation 2.

As we can read on the personal website of Franck Sauer, Widescreen Games had decided to mandate him and Yann Robert to work on this demo, just after the closure of their own company, Appeal Studios, following the cancellation of Outcast 2: The Lost Paradise and Tintin, using assets and technology previously created for those projects:

“After Appeal (our previous studio) went bankrupt (see Outcast II and Tintin stories) Yann and I kept working together on some work for hire while thinking about exactly what to do next.

During that time, Olivier Masclef who had been producer on Outcast came to us with an adventure game concept called Amon Ra. His studio (Widescreen Games) was busy on another production and he asked us to build an early prototype on Playstation 2 based on this concept.

As we had acquired the technology from Outcast II we had something to start with to quickly build the prototype. Yann started cleaning and enhancing the various unfinished technologies that would later serve as the basis for our FreshEngine.

To help me quickly edit the map, I used some refurbished assets from the defunct Outcast II and built some new stuff on top of it. My friend Francois-Xavier Melard worked on the character.

This was a short work of a couple weeks and after this prototype, the project never went further into development.”

Technology

“Some very advanced technologies for the time can be seen in action here (some of which were already implemented in the Outcast II prototype), such as realtime tesselation and vector displacement (water), radiosity and light probes (lighting of the character dependant on the environment, with light bouncing), soft shadows, dynamically rendered billboard (small vegetation), and pixel-occluded lens flares.

One of the amazing thing was the incredible amount of triangles the Playstation 2 was capable of pumping. Around 300k in a single frame, with the prototype running at 60 frames per seconds (…)”

Strangely enough, according to the now-defunct website of Widescreen Games, the game was planned for the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Here was what we could read about the storyline and its features:

The 10 commandments meets Stargate

Amon Ra is a 3rd person action adventure game mixing action phases, social interactions and puzzles solving in the totally new and lifelike world, mainly inspired by the ancient Egypt period.

As the hero, you will interact with hundreds of locals, engage in plenty of combat against aliens and go on numerous adventure game quests.

Storyline:

The player is named Shail, a young slave who will meet his fate; he is the one chosen by the Ankh entity to perform the Prophecy : free the human race from the Seth’s domination. This extra-terrestrial race has dominated his folks over centuries due to its superior knowledge and advanced technology.

Throughout the game, the player will interact with human guilds as the merchants, priests, rebels and an ancient civilization. Obviously, each of them carries out different goals and interests.

Conspiracies, romance, twists and turns will drive the story.

Will Shail be able to achieve his own objective to overthrow the Seths?

Unique Selling Points

  • A cutting-edge in-house engine to serve the game.
  • The original universe of the ancient Egypt mixed with some sci-fi components.
  • Numerous “organic” and huge locations : from mysterious temples, overcrowded bazaars, resting oasis, frightening caves to gigantic spacecrafts!
  • Hundreds of hi-detailed character models suiting the period as well as fantasy ones.
  • A brand new system of quests layers which will confer to the player the feeling to manage his own and original quest in a live universe.
  • Breath-taking actions due to the use of ancient magic and high-tech weapons.
  • Enhanced AI system for the NPCs who manage their life according their own interests. Any action you take has ripple effects on the whole community.

During their 10 years of existence, Widescreen Games had a lot of numerous other canceled titles.

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Ghetto Golf (IllFonic Ltd) [PC, PS3, Xbox 360 – Cancelled]

Ghetto Golf is a cancelled action/sport hybrid game in development at IllFonic Ltd from 2008 to 2010 for the download platforms of PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. In this game, the player took the role of Vonte, a young guy trying to make a name for himself in an underground golf sport while fighting cops and rival gangs in the mean streets of Oakland.

The game was showed at the Game Developers Conference 2009 and MTV Multiplayer was able to see some gameplay:

Chuck Brungardt described the first game he’s ever developed — the one he was showing publishers and MTV Multiplayer behind closed doors last month in San Francisco — as “Happy Gilmore” meets “Friday.”

That’s a novel pitch. But may we propose a different description?

Try “Grand Theft Auto” meets “Tiger Woods PGA.”

“Ghetto Golf” has its roots in Oakland California where Raphael Saadiq, former star of 1990s R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné! used to play golf on the streets, improvising golf holes with whatever he could find.

Decades later, Saadiq has his own Denver-based video game company, Illfonic, co-founded by his studio engineer, Brungardt. Their first project is “Ghetto Golf,” a planned downloadable game featuring a scrappy young guy named Vonte in the Bay Area who has to find and complete tricky holes of golf that are set in the wilds of the city — and in the line of fire of gangsters, cops and enemy golfers.

“We thought this idea would be cool,” Brungardt said as he and Illfonic’s lead designer, Kedhrin Gonzalez, ran through a build of the game made from a mod of “Unreal Tournament 3” in a meeting room in San Francisco last month.

One of the playable scenes they showed involved the hero Vonte needing to use his exploding golf ball to blow up a car that someone was ghost-riding. The player could sheath Vonte’s machine gun, flick past his spiked golf ball and his rubber golf ball to try his explosive golf ball and aim it with a swing at the car.

(…) Brungardt estimated that players would spend about half an hour looking for each golf hole before getting the course layout, the par, tackling the challenge and sinking their shots. He described the flow as “Zelda“-like: explore the terrain and talk to other characters in order to find the dungeon/golf-hole.

At last, a game that asks its hero to knock trick shots through dumpsters, off of exploding gas stations — and woe to the disapproving hoodlums in the neighborhood who would interfere with this display of sport. They get machine-gunned.

Vonte’s success in this sport of underground golf brings him from the mean streets of not-Oakland to nicer neighborhoods where cops and hippies are obstructions. The climactic level, of course, will take place in a nice country club by which time our ghetto golfer will have arrived.

“Ghetto Golf” has myriad influences. The golf controls involve a thumbstick back-and-forth swing, the aiming or arced trajectories and other trappings of golf games. The shooting is third-person “Gears of War“-style combat. A fat caddy gives you some missions. Your golf cart can be tricked out. Throw a spoiler on it. Your guns can be upgraded, “like in ‘Resident Evil 4,'” Brungardt pointed out. Drugs — they’ll have to change this — can be taken to slow down time for precision aiming and invincibility.

“Ghetto Golf” exists now as an “Unreal Tournament 3″ mod. Illfonic wants a publisher to support its development into a standalone downloadable game for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Steam.”

After this presentation, the game nevertheless fell into obscurity and was briefly mentioned at the beginning of 2010 before being cancelled around 2011-2012 according to XBLAFans while interviewing Kedhrin Gonzalez:

“Little information has been released thus far regarding Illfonic’s marriage between a 9 iron and a TEC-9, though the developer’s website had previously listed Ghetto Golf targeting Xbox Live Arcade in 2012. When XBLAFans spoke with Illfonic Creative Director and Co-Founder Kedhrin Gonzalez last year we learned that the developer had placed the title on hold in order to focus on another XBLA project, arena-shooter Nexuiz.”

“We actually first started with another project, Ghetto Golf, but had to put it on the backburner,” Gonzalez stated. “Instead, we decided to take a trip down nostalgia lane with an Arena FPS game.”

Despite a potential attempt to relaunch the project on next-gen platforms, Ghetto Golf was definitively canceled due to a lack of publishers interested in the game.

Today, IllFonic specializes in the development of asymmetrical multiplayer games using a few well-known film licenses such as Friday the 13th, Predator and Ghostbusters.

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