In the archive of Vast Lands of Grandia we can see some screenshots from a beta build of Grandia, which shows some changes from the final version. At this point the story was probably not finished yet, because there were some scenes not present in the released version, like Justin that falls from a rock in the volcano, a tank used against our heroes, Java absent from the cart in the mines and a mysterious rock that resembles a turtle. Other interesting details are the beta battle hud and the unusually high point of view of a city (New Parm?).
For more informations check the VLoG beta page! Huge props to them :)
Darknet (sometimes written Dark Net) was given a tiny preview in the August 1995 issue of Sega Power, in “Video Games The Ultimate Gaming Magazine” (Issue 90 July 1996) and in EGM 83, and aside from a small screenshot and some concept art, very little is said about the game. From the lone screenshot, it seems to be an isometric adventure game, similar to Diablo, but with a fairly unique plot, with four students being sucked into the internet itself and fighting against the titular Darknet. The game was developed by American Softworks for PC, Playstation and Saturn, scheduled for ‘some yet-to-be-decided date’ and never released.
Rayman is a video game designed and published by Ubisoft. It was originally released in September 1995 for the Atari Jaguar and MS-DOS, and in November 1995 for the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. A port of this game was to be released for the Sega 32X, but when the system died off due to low popularity, the port was canceled. Rayman is a traditional side-scrolling platform game which revolves around the titular character’s quest to save his world from the evil Mr. Dark.
Early in its development, Rayman was going to be about an eleven-year-old boy named Jimmy. Jimmy takes advantage of the realms that he discovers within his computer to create a fantasy world called Hereitscool. When evil invades Hereitscool, Jimmy turns into a superhero named Rayman to save Hereitscool. This idea was scrapped, and Rayman is his own being in his own world in the final version. There were a few comments in the story, such as “Sorry folks, this apparently can’t last. Do you want to play or what?”, but they were cut for the final version.
In these old screens from the back of the box from the Jaguar version, we can see some beta-differences.
beta rayman video: there is no sound and also the life icons are different. The life is in the top middle along with 8 life dots and instead of the orbs count you have a blue guys count but in the final version life count is in top left at the edge of the screen and the blue orbs in the top right rayman can also walk on his hands in this video (not sure about the final version).
Thanks to The_IT_08, Wilco and kieranmay for the contributions!
HMS Carnage (later renamed to Dreadnought /Dreadnoughts and internally know as Dread0) is a cancelled Victorian steam-punk shooter (with strategy elements) set on the red planet of Mars, that was in development for almost 3 years by the Tribe team at Ocean Software. It was an ambitious project, but only a small playable demo and detailed FMV were finished before Infogrames acquired Ocean in 1998 and decided to kill it some months later.
It seems that the game concept was somehow similar to Warhawk, released in 2007 for the Playstation 3, in which the player is able to use ground and air vehicles, turrets and on-foot weapons to kill their enemies and complete the mission objectives.
HMS Carnage was mainly a PC-CDROM game and the PSX / Saturn ports were an afterthought: the console versions would have been very different with more action and less strategy.
At the time Ocean had a reputation for producing low quality movie tie-ins but with the much-hyped arrival of CDROM as a gaming format they wanted to develop some really ground breaking games. Ocean rebranded their internal development department as “Tribe”, invested a lot of money, hired a lot of new talent and asked everyone to come up with amazing original concepts huge enough to fill a CDROM.
HMS Carnage was one of the winning concepts, Silver was another (released 4 years later) and the third was a point ‘n click adventure with Hanna-Barbera characters, called “Zoiks” which was also cancelled.
The game kept its “HMS Carnage” title throughout most of the development, while “Dreadnought” was a name thought up by the marketing department towards the end (the development team didn’t much like it). Probably they though it was a more sellable title for a shooter.
Sadly the name-change was not enough to save the game. When Infogrames bought Ocean and review Dreadnought, too much work and money were still needed to complete the project: they thought that it could have been an economic failure and decided to cancel the development. After the cancellation, part of the Tribe team went to work at Psygnosis.
A preview for HMS Carnage was published in Edge magazine issue 32 (1996), if you are able to scan those pages, please let us know!
Thanks a lot to Maria Ingold, Matt Wood, Julian Holtom for their help in preserving media and info from their lost project!
Thanks to Robert Seddon and Celine for the magazines scans!
Some months ago saturn_worship on the Assembler forum shared a series of scan from an old japanese Saturn Magazine, with lots of screens of Monster Maker: Holy Dagger, a Sega Saturn Strategy RPG developed by Nec Interchannel that was never released. This project could have been a sequel to the original “Monster Maker” also developed by Nec Interchannel and released for the PC Engine. This Saturn sequel looked really good, so it’s a real shame that we’ll never be able to play it.
If you have some more informations about this game, please let us know!
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