Demon’s Souls is an action rpg developed by From Software and released for the Ps3 in 2009. The opening cutscene mentions a “Land of Giants” which archstone was destroyed in order to seal the demons that infested it. The broken archstone can still be seen among the others, and many fans of the game thought that this lost / beta scenario was going to be playable in a future DLC, but no additional content was ever made available.
Article translated in Russian thanks to Sergey Tyutin!
Videos:
Rush Club is a cancelled racing game that was in development in 2001 by Wide Games (Kuju’s Brighton) for the Playstation 2, with planned ports for the GameCube and Xbox. The player would had to race in various cities (such as New York, Shanghai, London, and Tokyo) against rival street gangs, to reach the final goal before their competitors. Rush Club soon vanished from the PS2 release list and after Wide Games finished to work on Prisoner of War and Pilot Down: Behind Enemy Lines, in 2007 they changed their name to Zoë Mode.
The project was probably canned because they never found a publisher interested in it. The only screens and the video preserved from Rush Club look more like a tech demo than a real game.
Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!
Images:
Videos:
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction is an open world action game developed by Pandemic Studios and published in 2005 by LucasArts for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. DCodes7 was able to find 2 unused cut scenes, one placeholder intro and one unused trailer still hidden in the final game. Also, from looking at the data on the disk it’s possible to see some E3 files (maybe a beta level / demo?) and a debug menu (disabled).
In the gallery below you can see some beta screens with:
Images:
Videos:
God of War: Chains of Olympus is an action adventure developed by Ready at Dawn and released in march 2008 for the PSP. As we can read on Wikipedia, the game had already been in the development stages just before the completion of Daxter, when Ready At Dawn pitched the idea of a God of War game for the PSP to SCEA’s Santa Monica Studios.
In an interview after the game was completed, director Ru Weerasuriya stated that several things had to be cut from the game given time constraints. These included multiplayer and co-op aspects as well as other puzzles, characters and dialogue
Also, from an article at Industry Gamers, we found out that the game could have been a side scroller action game:
Dana Jan, lead level designer on the game, revealed that Ready at Dawn briefly thought about making the game 2-D. “There were early discussions of making Chains of Olympus a side-scroller rather than 3D in case the experience couldn’t be fully realized on a handheld,” he said. “This really fueled us to prove that it could be done.”
In the gallery below you can see some footage (thanks to L1qu1dSnak3‘s YT channel1) from the early development of the game: the “Making of Attica” (prototype of the first level) and “The Lost Levels” (removed areas and scenes) videos can be unlocked in the final game (Beat the game in God mode and finish the Challenge of Hades).
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
Videos:
Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes 2 is a third person shooter developed and published in 2000 by 3DO for the Playstation, Playstation 2 and Nintendo 64. In the gallery below you can see the first images that were released for the PS2 version: looking at the graphic in those screens, we can notice that it’s much more definited and detailed than the one seen in the final version. We can assume that these shots were just target renders, created with high-ends PCs or a PS2 development kit, to indicate how the game would have look when it was still too incomplete to show.
DCcodes7 noticed various differences:
Then there are the zombie enemies in the graveyard image, each zombie is different if you look at the image and compare each of the enemies closely. In that very same image the female character – which you get to play as in the game – her design is different in this image than it is in the final. One difference – from what I can tell – is her boots (shoes) are white in this image but are brown in the final game.
In another screen we have the helicopter – up right hand corner of the image – that’s shooting while flying straight at the main character: the way the helicopter fires and how it fly’s is different in the target renders than it is in the final.
In that same image we have a tank, again, not found in this level. There is also the “red target” around the tank, this of course means that auto aim is active and is targeting the tank. Of course the auto aim is still in the game, however the red auto aim target is different in the target renders than it is in the final.
The town seen in one of the images is on fire, which doesn’t happen in the game at all.
In another image we see a scoped version of the M16 weapon: of course the M16 is used but the scoped version of the very same weapon is not however.
Then we have the HUD: that’s seen in all of these target renders, the HUD is different in the final.
Thanks to DCcodes7 for the contribution!
Images: