In 2006, Eurocom began working with Sony Computer Entertainment on a PlayStation 3 exclusive project titled The Protector. Development progressed far enough that voice recording sessions had already begun by 2007. However, the game was ultimately cancelled in early 2008. Because the project was never officially announced, very little information about its gameplay, story, or overall design has ever been publicly revealed.
Following the cancellation of The Protector, Eurocom continued developing several licensed and original titles between 2008 and 2009, including Quantum of Solace (PlayStation 2 version), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, G-Force, and the Wii-exclusive shooter Dead Space: Extraction, developed in collaboration with Electronic Arts.
Andrew Spinks, who worked on the storyboards and animations for The Protector, kindly shared his artwork and a series of screenshots with us along with some memories of this lost project:
“I was hired as a freelance storyboard artist by Eurocom to storyboard 3 key cutscenes for the demo version of “The Protector”, a planned PS3 Sony exclusive set for release early on in the PS3’s history. I eventually went to work in-house at the Eurocom studios in Derby and remember playing on the demonstration models of the PS3 which we have sent to us. I spent around 3 months working freelance before being hired by the company as a junior animator to animate the cameras in the cutscenes that I had storyboarded, using 3D Max. I completed two sets of storyboards before going to work in Derby and the first set took around 2 and a half months, they were quite detailed and essentially some of my best work at that time. A deadline was set to redraw the majority of the storyboards, I guess before submission to Sony, adding camera movements as a side directional element. I managed to fulfill this task in a short time span and the new storyboards became grittier and more visceral as a result. The parallels between this game, The Protector (2007), and The Last of Us (2009), has never really ever been addressed or hinted at before, but I do feel that Sony might have used some form of inspiration from this cancelled game that we were working on to help develop The Last of Us. I remember working with the design team when possible to make our central character, more beaten and world weary. I remember saying to people, “Make him older, give him lines of distinction, like Humphry Boggart.” And that the character model should always be alert and looking around instead of being static. When I saw the first trailer for The Last of Us, I can’t lie, I saw our game. The parallels are astounding. The central character of Joel is very much who and what we were developing and the Joel and Ellie dynamic was also present in The Protector. In The Protector, you played a hired-gun essentially who’s job was to rescue the American president’s children who had been kidnapped by a guerilla faction after a plane crash. And yes, there was a young girl character amongst those children who very much had a similar age and manner as Ellie.”
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