At GDC 2008 Naughty Dog showed an interesting video about the development of Uncharted, (aka Project Big) with some footage from beta-test levels and a different character design for Nathan “Nate” Drake. Even Elena Fisher underwent changes during development: in the early version the character had dark brown hair, but in the final version the color changed to blonde and the face was altered.
Thanks to trainer15side and Juanan for the contributions!
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Race N Chase was the original project name for the now famous Grand Theft Auto serie, when it was still just a concept in the DMA Design‘s minds. Thanks to Mikedaily Flickr account we can see a nice mockup from the early development of the first game. And here one of the first versions of the game that was posted on Mike Daily’s page some time ago.
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From early screenthos of Crash Twinsanity, we can notice that some stuff were different in the beta version: a character and some levels were removed (Foofie, the Lava Caves, Gone A Bit Coco), there were Bats in N. Sanity Island, the 10th Dimension area was different, Slip Slide Icecapades had a completely different layout and Farmer Ernest’s farm changed its location during development. A prototype of Twinsanity was know as “Crash Bandicoot Evolution” and it was meant to be much different and l
Cortex Chaos was a spin-off game from the Crash Bandicoot franchise, that was in development at Traveller’s Tales Oxford, but that was cancelled just after the early concept stage. The game is also know as “The All-New Cortex Show” and the player would have used Dr. Neo Cortex as the main character. The project had some interesting ideas, as we can read in the Crash Mania website: “The first proposal was based on the idea that Cortex had a series of little Clones and he would have beeen able to control them to do several little tasks … such as pick up and throw bombs, collect items, or line-up to create a bridge” […] “The Second followed a Rockman/MegaMan style idea” […] “The Third idea somehow had Nina involved more… and used weapon upgrades”. You can read more infos at Crash Mania. Thanks a lot to HPZr!
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In August 2004, High Moon Studios (at that time still known as Sammy Studios; owned by Sammy Japan) started to work on a title codenamed “Alien”. After Sega was acquired by Sammy Japan, Sega took control over Sammy’s North American studios. As a result, they tried to close Sammy Studios.
However, Sammy Studios got independent and reappeared under the name “High Moon Studios”. Sadly, Project Alien was cancelled in August 2005.
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