‘Superman: Man of Steel’ was the last known working title of an open world action game Factor 5 were working on for Brash Entertainment, which was being based around the legendary DC comics superhero license, Superman. It was planned to be made for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. Its initial codename was ‘Blue Steel’.
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Career Criminal is an action game that was in development at Midway Austin (formerly Inevitable Entertainment) for the XBOX 360 and PS3, but later cancelled because it was too risky economically. It seems that the game would have been about stealing jewels / other precious stuff and it was set in a sandbox world. Sadly the studio closed its doors in December 2008, laying off the entire local workforce as part of a larger, company-wide, action.
As we can read on Kotaku, the president of Midway explained that: “The Career Criminal title was a large, ambitious, open-world project. Midway management recognizes that ambitious games need extensive resources and can require lengthy development cycles with much iteration. We are willing to invest in the long run and we need to continue developing new intellectual properties. But all of our projects have to demonstrate a likelihood of success and profitability. The resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile for the Career Criminal project were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success.”
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Titan was a concept for a game that was in development at StormFront Studios (the original creators of Neverwinter Nights) before it was closed down on March 31, 2008. From the look of the few artworks available, it seems that the game was going to be an action adventure / third person shooter, with an huge robot to use as support in the battles. Sadly Titan was cancelled with the death of StormFront.
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Climax USA, a Santa Monica developers studio, was working on a demo for a Silent Hill pitch for PS3. However, Konami handed over the development of a next-gen version to Double Helix Studios. As we can see in the video, for this Silent Hill prototype Climax used the same protagonist from their Silent Hill PSP game (Travis). Keep in mind that this does not mean that Travis would have been in the final storyline, as this was just a tech demo to try to pitch for a full project and probably the story was not decided yet.
While Climax USA was closed during development of Silent Hill: Origins for PSP, the UK branch is rumored to be in charge of a remake of Silent Hill 1 for PSP and Wii.
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On Gamasutra we can read an interesting article about the development of the first Ratchet & Clank for the Playstation 3: “One of the first features developed for Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the “Groovitron” — a bomb that was part boom box and part laser light show. Throw the bomb, force your foe into spontaneous dance, and then kill him to a disco soundtrack. […]
To start, we decided to visualize the Ratchet & Clank universe PS3-style by recreating Metropolis, one of the iconic locations from our PS2 series. We did this by building a “diorama” of the city, adding vehicles, and sending a camera through it. We built our test city using the Resistance engine, stitched together a frame by frame camera fly through, and added audio effects to simulate the experience of being in Metropolis. […]
Progress was slow, but we were still making some. By the end of preproduction we had one semi-complete level that was functional but not very stable. This would eventually become “Kerchu City” […]
Establishing a design for Ratchet proved especially challenging as we considered redefining the character. He went through numerous iterations before we felt we got him right. […]
We wanted the game experience to last about 15 hours — and we achieved this — but the final scope of our game was 16 planets, 3 space combat missions, 45 minutes of cinematic animation, and single player mode only. At the end of preproduction RCF‘s design called for 25 unique planets, 5 space combat missions, 1 hour of cinematic cut scenes, a hazily-defined co-op mode, and an even more ambiguous online component.
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