The original Zombies Ate My Neighbors was developed by LucasArts and published by Konami for the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993. A “sequel” titled Ghoul Patrol was released in 1994, but it was originally conceived as a different game. Many years later a true Zombies Ate My Neighbors sequel was pitched for Playstation 2 and Xbox, but unfortunately it was never fully developed. This project was never officially announced, but in 2020 Daniel Ibbertson (Slopes Game Room) shared a couple of screenshots from this cancelled project, sent to him by a former developer:
“A good few years ago I was contacted by one of the lead devs of the original Zombies Ate My Neighbours game. He was a fan of the channel and thanked me for making a video on the franchise :)
If that wasn’t cool enough he then went on to explain that a TRUE sequel was pitched but sadly not successful. Here are a couple of pics he showed me from that original pitch. The plan was that I would interview him and show off more, but sadly that never happened :(
We have lost contact over the last couple of years now and I have been sitting on these images for a long time not really knowing what to do with them! So, before I accidentally delete them I feel it is best that I share them with the world :P”
The Wall is a cancelled immersive sim that was in development between 2005 and 2008 by Burut Creative Team and Play Ten, planned to be released on Playstation 3 and PC. Gameplay would have been similar to Deus Ex, with players helping one of three major factions in a dystopian future: The Government, The Environmentalists, and The Church. NPCs would react dynamically to your actions in sand-box levels you could freely explore to choose how to resolve missions, using customizable weapons, vehicles and special powers.
We can read some details about the game in interviews published at the time by PS3Land and FiringSquad:
“I believe the concept of “The Wall” world is a grotesque reflection of the modern world. We want to show all the avarice and ambition of transnational corporations, who pursue their business targets regardless of the consequences. In their quest for profit often the great treasures of the past, the cultural heritage of Humanity is sacrificed. Trying to improve the world, some greedy corporate giants are destroying it in fact, without paying any attention to this sad truth and firmly believing in the righteousness of their ways. They continue to push the deadly balance wheel, which is poised to crush them in the end. Also we want to show religious fanaticism with it’s terrible bigotry and superstition. Often the fundamentalist zealots are ready to devastate the existing world, just to create an ideal one they imagine in its place.”
“The game’s concept went through many iterations. Our efforts finally bore fruit, and we’ve invented around a dozen of features that are unique to the genre, and should be very interesting to the gamers. Among them are the totally destructible environment, intense development of the character’s relations with the outside world, the team and rankings which change during the course of events.”
The Wall was previewed by some gaming websites, such as CheatCC, Ixbt, and IGN:
“Various super-human abilities will be revealed throughout the course of the game, no doubt proving useful for overcoming certain obstacles and defeating enemies. Developers claim that personality points and actions will affect the plot and how characters react to the player, ala Deus Ex. Which side you choose also affects the game content, including weapons. For example the Government rifles are very industrial, while the Environmentalist firearms are handcrafted with leather and groovy characters etched into them. Weapons are customizable and there are vehicles to drive”
“Players will become Adam – a young man genetically modified by the scientists of the Church. Waking up after suspended animation, Adam must go to fulfill the mission entrusted to him, but the deep freeze slightly affected his brain. As a result of amnesia, Adam remains on his own, and is free to choose his own destiny.”
“The Wall will offer non-linear gameplay and it is up to you to choose whether to strengthen the power of the Government by eradicating the dissatisfied, help an environmentalist or become the God of a New religion. Not only the style of the game depends on the choices you make, but also its endings.”
“About 25 missions are planned, taking place in a wide variety of places – from the skyscrapers of the Government to the underwater levels of poor neighborhoods.”
“One of the more noticeable elements includes highly-destructible environments with numerous break points. Objects, parts of buildings, entire buildings, and other sections of the play area can be gradually and fully destroyed. The amount of destruction is entirely dependent on the type of weapon being used to create it too. An example that Play Ten uses to illustrate this is that a tree won’t be seriously damaged by a pistol, but a rocket launcher will take care of it quite nicely. This sort of destruction isn’t just for looks, though — use can do things like destroy catwalk supports to knock enemies down from snipe points as well. “
“The addition of squad members with specific personalities is one such inclusion, as its RPG-like ranking system affects how people react to the hero. Missions are nonlinear too and like other open-ended games before it, The Wall will give users the option to take on primary and bonus missions that affect the ultimate outcome of the story.”
As far as we know the game was last seen at the Leipzig Convention 2008, then quietly vanished, forgotten by everyone. Play Ten was bought by Bestway Group in October 2008 and merged alongside two other big Russian publishers: Russobit-M and Game Factory Interactive. We assume the new company was not interested in publishing the game, and without a publisher Burut switched their resources to other projects (such as Cannon Fodder 3).
After releasing Pac-Man World 3 in 2005, between 2008 / 2010 Namco America (Namco Hometek) were working on a “Next Gen” Pac-Man 3D platformer for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. While this “Pac-Man World 4” was never officially announced, fans of the series found a concept trailer created for the project by a former Namco animator. Gameplay looked similar to previous Pac-Man World chapters: Pac-Man would have been able to roll and run around the levels, transforming itself into different forms such as a propeller and some kind of spiky drill.
We don’t know why this project was never completed and fans had to wait till 2013 for another Pac-Man platformer, when Namco released Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures. Concept art created for this lost game are preserved below, to remember its existence.
Barnyard is an action game based on the movie of the same name, developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment and published by THQ for GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, and PC. Footage of beta gameplay has been uploaded to the IGN youtube channel as a video titled “Barnyard GameCube Video – Clip Compilation 2”.
The main differences in this beta footage are:
animals could freely walk around the map
there was a life-counter (was completely removed in the final version)
players had “happiness level”
the map was completely different
The mobile phone had a music player, battery energy, and an integrated camera that could take photos.
There was also a multiplayer mode for some of the minigames such as chicken coop (this minigame was heavily changed in the final version).
Besides IGN’s gameplay on Youtube there’s an official trailer where the Beta version was shown for the first time. It’s still not known if the version in this trailer was different from the one IGN previewed.
the models of the trees and of the fences were different
map still had some difference, but it’s pretty close to the final appearance
minigames with up-to 4 players multiplayer were still there.
This gameplay was found on a Spanish website named 3DJuegos. The released Barnyard seems to have been built from a canceled, unannounced game in which all NPCs could interact with each other, build relationships and more. This is why the beta version of the game had more advanced NPC AI, but it’s still not known why it was later removed.
Dwarfs (also known as “Seven Dwarves“) is a canceled action adventure game from Obsidian Entertainment, once planned for the PS3 and Xbox 360. The game was intended to be a tie-in to a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs prequel that was in development at the time. Both the game and the movie were planned to be cornerstones to a new franchise aimed at boys to go alongside its other properties.
This wasn’t Disney’s first attempt at expanding the Snow White story. Walt Disney himself had considered it due to public and internal popularity of the characters despite his own dislike of sequels. However nothing ever came of them until the mid 2000s when Disney’s home video department DisneyToon Studios decided to work with the story. Their idea was a prequel with a darker tone intended to explain the origins of the cast, taking inspiration from The Lord of the Rings. The plot would have been about the seven dwarves journeying together with a young girl to stop an evil wizard finding an ancient dwarven power. However, things are not what they seem as it is revealed that the dwarves have been manipulated by the young girl who is the daughter of the wizard. She betrays the dwarves and curses her father, proceeding to take over the kingdom and thus setting up the original movie.
Soon after the project started, it began to develop an internal following. Many saw Dwarfs as the seeds to a new franchise to go alongside Disney’s Fairies and Princess lines. In order to get the fledgling franchise off to a good start, a video game was proposed. Obsidian was approached due to their history and skills developing deep RPGs, such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights 2. The game, known as “Project New Jersey” internally, was intended to be a third person action adventure with a much darker tone than even the prequel movie. Kevin Saunders (game designer at Obsidian for such titles as KotOR2 and NN2) was the Lead Designer on Dwarfs, and he gave a short description of the opening of the game on his Formspring account:
“This wasn’t a happy-go-lucky Disney game. Disney’s Buena Vista Games wanted dark and I gave them dark. In the opening sequence, for example, you, as a teenage prince, awake in your bed to haunting sounds. Exploring the dark castle, you come across a terrifying shadowy creature that you kill in a desperate struggle – its cries shifting from a supernatural shriek to that of a human woman’s bloodcurdling cry of death. The illusion is then dispelled, and your mother, the Queen, lays dead before you, the bloody knife that killed her in your hand. This wasn’t a cinematic – it was all a gameplay sequence that you’d actually play out“
Saunders’s Formspring post also names some of the proposed team. Obsidian built a team of veterans for this project. Josh Sawyer (who was the lead designer for Icewind Dale 2 and later director for Fallout: New Vegas) was picked as the systems / combat lead. Brian Menze, a longtime artist for both Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, was doing the concept art for Dwarfs. Saunders described Menze work as “So much personality and character, reminiscent of Disney’s classic characters, but weathered by the grim realities of a dark fantasy world”. Brian Mitsoda, known for being a Writer for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, worked as the creative lead on the project and along with Kevin Saunders on the story. When asked about Dwarfs, he said:
“If I could resurrect any project that I worked on, it would be this one. This was essentially our action-RPG version of a Pixar movie crossed with a first-party Nintendo game. I don’t know how much is still covered by NDA, but it was obviously inspired by Disney’s classic movies artistically, although script-wise we definitely wanted to capture the characterization and emotion of Pixar films. Conceptually, it was a darker fairytale type of story, but it was mostly focused on the journey of the teenage protagonists as they journeyed around the land meeting up with these eccentric little men and using their unique powers to advance through the plot. It had a lot of heart, great monster and character concepts by Brian Menze, and very interesting level potential.”
With an enthusiastic and experienced team coming together and a plan set in place, things looked set for work to begin on a great new game. However, things weren’t looking so good for the movie, with difficulty for Studio Executives and their desire to add their own touches to the film. Having to constantly fight to keep the movie true to its original vision, director Mike Disa (who previously worked on such titles as Pocahontas, Fantasia 2000, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Origin Of Stitch) felt burnt out with the project.
In particular, a repeated insistence by studio executives of having the character of Dopey to talk in the movie and then to explain his mutism in the original movie as trauma from watching his mother die. As Mike told during an interview with Integratedcatholiclife:
“Essentially the studio executive wanted Dopey to talk! [Laughs in disbelief.] It just comes down to my respect for great films. Snow White is today still the best animated film ever made. Those characters are spectacular. It’s a sad statement on our industry that the best film was 80 years ago, but it’s still the best film. I would never walk into a sequel and do anything to disrespect the core of the characters like making Dopey talk.”
Around this time, Pixar’s creative director John Lasseter took over Disney’s animation departments and was reviewing the current projects. At first it seemed like Dwarfs would be safe but as the executives pushed for more influence, Disa’s confidence on his project dropped. Not wanting to pitch an idea that he didn’t believe in, Disa left the project and Dwarfs was canceled as soon as Lasseter got a look at the new script. This was also the end for Obsidian’s game.
Many of the team who worked on Dwarfs were sad to see it go. Brian Mitsoda described his feeling as: “I think if it had come out, it would be considered a classic today. It still hurts to know we’ll never finish it. If DoubleBear (Mitsoda’s own company) ever gets big enough, I would totally do something similar to it”. His wife, Annie Mitsoda, described the game as her “One that got away”. Feargus Urquhart, Ceo of Obsidian, talked about the game in an interview with Kotaku: “It was a lot of fun, we feel we turned in a really cool prototype. We worked on it for about a year. It’s one of the games here that the team just loved working on. And unfortunately – which, it happens in this industry – you have changes of focus at a publisher.”
Since Dwarfs’ cancellation, Obsidian has moved on to other high profile projects like Fallout: New Vegas, and other licensed games like South Park: The Stick of Truth. However this wasn’t the last time Obsidian had a licensed game canceled on them: you can check out the article on Aliens: Crucible. Other lost projects conceived by the team were Futureblight, a post-apocalyptic RPG for Take-Two Interactive, a couple of pitches for EA and Ubisoft, and “Project North Carolina”, an open world adventure to be published by Microsoft for their Xbox One.
After so many canned games Obsidian’s future could have been bleak, but in 2015 they finally released Pillars of Eternity thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it was welcomed by gamers as one of the best RPGs of the last decade.
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