Beta + Cancelled Others Video Games - Page 17 of 171

Mindhack is a cancelled Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter developed by Mindware Studios around 2001-2002, exclusively for PC.

No information about Mindhack’s background are available at the moment. By looking at the few artworks and screenshots of the game, we can tell that it was set in a futuristic science fiction universe. The game was revealed in March 2002 with a short explanation of its concept on a dedicated website:

“Mindhack is an Online Action Game which combines popular and proven elements of first person action games with the principles of mass online games (massive socializing support, persistent character, etc.). The system of game rules is relatively straight forward while providing a great number of game types and many different ways players can enjoy the game.
Mindhack is not intended solely for hardcore players but also for mass-market players preferring the action genre. Players will be attracted by familiar action principles combined with many socializing elements which will allow them to interact with other players in ways not seen today in games of this type.”

Using a proprietary engine called MENG, it seems the game was showed at the Game Developers Conference 2002 in order to sign with a publisher, apparently without success, before falling into obscurity for a few years.

In 2006, following the future release of Mac and Linux versions of their first game, Cold War, Phoronix was able to interview programmer Patrik Rak. Mindhack was briefly mentionned about its cancellation:

“(…) The goal at that time was to develop a FPS based MMO game, but several month later we have concluded that the MMO market became so crowded that all but the best backed up of these project are necessarily going to bite the dust. So we quickly steered to more conventional waters of the third-person single player world, before any serious harm was done.”

According to former CEO Karel Papik, the technology primarly developed for Mindhack would later served as a basis for Cold War.

Mindhack wasn’t the only cancelled game from Mindware Studios. In 2006, the company had to axe Voodoo Nights and Unknown Heroes, both due to a lack of publishers interested in the projects.

If you know someone who worked on Mindhack and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

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Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Amon Ra (Widescreen Games) [PS2 – Prototype]

Daniel Nicaise

31-10-2022

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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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PC / MAC

The Triangle (Digital Spray Studios) [PC – Cancelled]

Daniel Nicaise

24-10-2022

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The Triangle is a cancelled First-Person Shooter developed around 2003-2004 by Digital Spray Studios, only for the PC.

As we can read on the now-defunct website of it’s developer, The Triangle was:

“A First Person Shooter, in a classical “kill ’em all” style. Game actions take place at the mysterious islands in the Atlantic Ocean, in the region of the, so called, Bermuda Triangle. The main hero is the explorer of mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. He finds temples, palaces and the lost cities of an unknown antique civilization and tries to solve the secret of it’s downfall. When he starts the exploration of those ancient buildings, our hero finds out that they are not desolated, but populated by some kind of fantastic alien creatures, which are not “very friendly” to him. Now he has to try hard to remain alive.”

The game was revealed at the Game Developers Conference 2003, along with You Are Empty, using the same proprietary engine, the DS2 Engine. Some media drawn a comparison with the game Serious Sam.

Little information is available on The Triangle to date. Unlike You Are Empty, which had found a publisher, The Triangle quickly disappeared from radar screens when it was announced and never resurfaced. Only a few screenshots are currently available to remember its existence. We can assume that the developers did not manage to find a potential publisher and decided to postpone the development of the game to devote themselves to You Are Empty, which was released in Eastern Europe in 2006 and in North America in 2007, thanks to Atari, after a chaotic development.

If you know someone who worked on The Triangle and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

Images:

PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Xbox 360

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

Daniel Nicaise

24-10-2022

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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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PC / MAC

Worlds of Ultima III: Arthurian Legends (Origin Systems) [PC – Cancelled]

Todd_the_Toad

17-09-2022

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The Worlds of Ultima series (an offshoot of the main series Ultima) died after the first two parts – Savage Empire (1990) and Martian Dreams (1991) – fell short of their expectations. However, the idea of independent stories still attracted Origin, which resulted in the emergence of Arthurian Legends. The project, in general, was doomed from the very beginning – it was not possible to find a publisher for it after the failure of “Worlds …”.

Nevertheless, the Origin staff continued to work on it. First, the work was supervised by Richard Garriott, then by Warren Spector. Unlike most other Camelot games, the Arthurian Legends strictly followed the writings of Thomas Malory and Chrétien de Troyes (medieval writers, authors of books about King Arthur). But the game formally had nothing to do with the Worlds of Ultima.

From wiki.ultimacodex.com:

Arthurian Legends was to be set in ancient England, in a world based on the actual legends about King Arthur. Some of the sources used included Knight of the Cart by Chretien de Troyes, and Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The player would be in charge of trying to find the missing King Arthur and to fix the problems currently plaguing Camelot. Though the initial idea was for the player’s alter ego to be one of the twelve knights of the Round Table, this was eventually changed for the player to create his own avatar. Several well-known characters were going to make appearances, including Sir Pelenor, Sir Gawain, Melora, Sir Mordred, Morgana, Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur.
The game was going to include some of the bloodier elements from the legends, such as a giant cannibal that was praying on the children from a local village. However, the search for the Grail was not to be included, as the team felt it had already been played out too many times. Other quests included curing Sir Pellinore from a blindness inflicted to him by an evil mage, and a maze of moving thorn hedges.

What is funny, after the end of the series, the Origin staff jokingly drew a silhouette in front of the office with chalk on the ground, as they do with corpses, and hung a sign “The King is Dead” next to it. The next day, flowers appeared under it.

Information is taken from «Игромания» magazine, 03 (114) 2007