Xbox

Safari Joe [PC PS2 XBOX – Cancelled]

Safari Joe is a cancelled action-adventure game that was in development by Titus Software around 2003. Key figures in the development team were Rob Stevens (project leader), Jean-Luc Martinez (programming lead) and Eric Marradi (art lead). The game was set in Africa – central Africa around the turn of the last century to be more precise.

The hero, ‘Safari’ Joe, is hired by an aging anthropologist, professor Livingwood, to take him into the jungle in search of a lost civilization his research has led him to believe is there. An expedition is formed comprising of Joe, the professor, the professor’s assistant, Myra, Joe’s partner, Mohammed, and a female journalist, Kate. Obviously they find the lost civilization and a little something extra; an evil witch doctor called Mobaj Mojumbo.

While Professor Livingwood is examining a mummy-like corpse laid out on an altar he accidentally resuscitates the malefic priest, who had been defeated during a combat with the priests of the lost civilization thousands of years ago. To stop the evil witch Safari Joe need to find four temples and explore their interiors to find each piece of the weapon, in the form of talismans. In order to find the temples, however, Joe and his friends must explore the jungle to unearth the traces of the ancient civilization. During their travels they encounter various different tribes, some friendly, some not, some human, some not, which lead them into various little side adventures to supplement their quest.

The game was never released, probably because Titus was living serious financial strains at the time that would end up bringing the company to bankruptcy in 2005.

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Arc Angel (Rare Ltd) [Xbox – Prototype]

Arc Angel is a cancelled futuristic racing game prototype that was in development in 2003 for the Xbox, by a team lead by Chris Seavor at Rare LTD. There are just a few info about this lost project as a nice article at Pure Rarity:

Chris said that for the record Conker 2 was never scrapped; he just didn’t want to do it at the time and that was how Arc Angel was conceived. A nice easy racing game, or so he thought. During the four months he headed it a fair amount of design was nailed down but it eventually proved to be too ambitious. Also, some team members left the company or moved to other projects leaving Arc Angel with a lack of resources. Eventually the game was cancelled and Chris was put on Quest as lead artist.

Some more info can be read in another article from the same site:

He told me Seavor was initially on Conker 2 but then moved onto a racing project which was cancelled. Supposedly he is now on something MMORPG. This was some really interesting stuff but I wanted to find out more about it so I asked Tony Wong as well. He hadn’t heard about the racer but confirmed that the Conker team has been disbanded. As for the MMORPG, he said he couldn’t comment on it since it was not official.

I remembered a post in the FatBabies forums about Nintendo cancelling a futuristic racer and asked Martin if this was the same game. He told me it was the Rare management — not Nintendo — that had cancelled it and that it probably was futuristic. He explained that Nintendo always leave people alone if they produce good work.

Sadly there are no preserved images or videos about Arc Angel. If you know someone that worked on this prototype, please let  us know! We would love to save some screens in the archive. 

Rayman 3 [Beta – PS2 / Xbox / GameCube]

Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc is a platform game developed by Ubisoft and released for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC in 2003. A Rayman 3 beta demo was leaked online sometime ago, with some differences as character models, voices and controls. I did not play the final version of Rayman 3, so if you can notice some more differences in the development screens or the beta videos below, please let us know!

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Orpheus [PS2 XBOX – Prototype]

Orpheus was one of many cancelled prototypes /concepts for games that french studio Darkworks worked on during 2003/2004. It appears as if Darkworks could not find a publisher and the title was abandoned. Instead, they started to work on I Am Alive for Ubisoft, before the publisher decided to move the development to Ubisoft Shanghai. Sadly we don’t know what kind of gameplay could have been planned for Orpheus and only few concept arts remain, to preserve the existence of this project.

Thanks to Dorwaks for the contribution!

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Storm Riders [Xbox – Cancelled]

Storm Riders is a cancelled action game that was in development for the original Xbox, that could have been based on a korean film / comic with the same name. There are not many info on its development, but an early beta version / prototype of the game was somehow found on an old Xbox Debug Kit by Museman and it was shared online thanks to the Assembler Games Forum. The menu, HUD and some of the character’s moves are really similar to Ninja Gaiden, but there aren’t any connection with Tecmo’s game.

As wrote by Andrew Borman in the Assembler Forum:

Storm Riders was built really, really late in the Xbox’s life, July 22 2005, NG started life in like 1999 before being announced at e3 2002 and released in March 2004. I havent found any evidence other than one comment that seemed to think it came from a Tecmo Xbox. Ive dug through the XBE some more and didnt find anything. It was compiled from a folder called Phoenix, which I thought might be related to Iron Phoenix, but beyond that I havent seen the evidence to link it, so I moed on.

Borrowing assets isn’t all that unusual in the dev world, so the NG assets are meaningless. But if you look up Storm Riders Online, which was to be an MMO, it was made by a studio called Phoenix Games Studio, which with the compile info points to it being from them, which is a studio in Malaysia. This also links back to the fact that the Xbox it was found on was 220v, which wouldnt be the case for a Japanese box, but does match for Malaysia. So that is much more likely

Thanks a lot to MegaMoto85 for the video!

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