Beta + Cancelled Playstation Video Games

Maximum Gauge was an 2D/3D adventure game with a sci-fi theme in development for the PC and the Playstation 1, developed by Big Grub and published by MGM Interactive. Gregg Tavares, who was Programmer at the time, described the game as “take Diablo but make it play like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past“.

In June 1997, issue #15 of French magazine PlayMag wrote about the title:

Gregg Tavares and John Alvarado, with their experience with Hollywood studios, approached MGM, which had expressed its desire to launch an interactive branch. Result: Maximum Gauge on Playstation.
Gregg wanted to tackle a much more perilous field, that of Zelda-style RPGs. As a fan of Chrono Trigger, Zelda and company, he set himself a challenge: create an equivalent on Playstation with a much more sophisticated graphic style. Indeed, the big difference with a Super Nintendo RPG lies first of all in the 3D modeling of the sprites. Thus, all the characters and decorative elements are made in pseudo 3D. All bosses will be real 3D objects like certain special effects in the game. As for the character animation, it is also designed in 3D Studio, then transformed into sprites. This results in neat and very precise work. Indeed, if the animators find issues in the digitization of the sprites, they can modify the key frames of the movement. Fluidity is therefore there.
Maximum Gauge begins in the distant future in a distant galaxy. You and a band of merry men are at the controls of your spaceship when you crash on a completely unknown planet. The ship can be repaired but unfortunately the technician has disappeared. All you have left is an unfortunate shovel to explore this mysterious land. It’s like a basic sword in an RPG. All you have to do now is find a better weapon. (…) Unlike a Japanese game, Maximum Gauge explains the situation to you with humor. You have to laugh at your own misfortune and the designers of Big Grub couldn’t help but make references to American blockbusters. Brandon Humphreys, in charge of cinematics, gave us a mix between True Lies and Last Action Hero. (…)
The Art Director Willis Wong is obsessed with Japanese style. Despite everything, we still find a slight Japanese touch, all giving a rather special atmosphere. Like Zelda, Maximum Gauge is a game where you never stop exploring to discover new play areas. Weapons play a huge role at this level since some of them destroy specific obstacles. As a result, it is necessary to remember all the details of Maximum Gauge. Thus, an ultrasonic gun atomizes the crystal peaks which seemed unbreakable a few hours or days before. A grappling gun also gives you access to hidden corners. Don’t forget the shovel when you find something better because if it is used to crush enemy faces at first, it can also dig. Once the hero gets his hands on the metal detector, he makes holes and scans them to unearth treasures.
Your companions keep coming to your aid. The inventor is responsible for assembling the parts that seem unnecessary. You have to constantly question him and get to know him because it turns out to be essential. Even if the gameplay is essential in an RPG where you have to constantly fight, Big Grub attached great importance to the music. As proof, I cite the $50,000 invested in musical equipment and the full-time composer that the company hired. (…) Maximum Gauge therefore offers a slew of different themes that keep changing depending on your actions and the places you explore. No mystery, the music accelerates when facing bosses, calms down in green settings, darkens in swamps and completely immerses you in the world of Maximum Gauge. To conclude, Maximum Gauge is one of the flagship titles from MGM Interactive which intends to make a sensational arrival in the video game world by giving a breath of fresh air to a genre that does not really seem to evolve. It remains to be seen if in one take, our friends at Big Grub will do as well as the Japanese.

Atari Compendium made an interview of Tavares back in 2007, and Maximum Gauge was briefly mentionned:

Q: There were a few projects that you worked on that ultimately never got released (or possibly finished). Do you recall the reason(s) why?
Gregg Tavares: (…) Big Grub’s unreleased game was called Maximum Gauge. It was basically SNES Zelda-type of adventure with Diablo or better graphics. The main characters were Space Marines. (…)
Q: If you had a chance to redo any of your games, what would you change?
Gregg Tavares: That’s a hard question. If I was to redo Maximum Gauge I’d redesign it around the dialog since because it’s an adventure game. That’s really where those games get their base. Originally I designed it around the levels and thought I’d fill in dialog later. But more than design I would manage it differently and hopefully in a way that it would have shipped.

Apparently there were direction problems and the game never seen the light of the day, as Tavares explained on his old personal website:

The second time I started a company it was called Seven. A few things I learned there: 1) Never except a fixed amount of money for an unspecified amount of work. This was obvious at the time but we were anxious to get started on something so we excepted. 2) Partners are generally bad. Not bad people just a bad idea. You can hear this advice from many many different people. There are several problems with partners. Is it an equal partnership? Will you have to put in the same amount of effort? For example a programmer may have to work 11 hours a day to get his work done. The accounting partner might only have to work 2 hours a week to get his work done especially for a small company. Sooner or later this kind of issue will cause a painful break in the partnership. Another is direction, some partners might want to do one type of game where as another might want to do something else, maybe not even games. I believe this is what happened at Id Software. It also happened at Seven and Big Grub and caused no end of frustration for everybody involved.
The last time I started a company was with Big Grub. This time there were four partners. Again we had the direction problem. Which type of game should we do next or should we do something other than games etc. Which small side projects should we take on. The big lesson I think I learned is that it is very very important to have a good Director. The Game Director is my definition for the person that has the vision of the final game in his head and it is his job to direct everybody to create it. That would mean the best Game Director would be someone who is both the main Game Designer and also the game’s manager (schedules, budget, etc.) That’s a very hard person to find. People that design don’t usually want to manage and people that manage aren’t generally qualified to design. That person also needs to authority to direct. I believe that can be next to impossible with partners. Equal partners can generally say, “screw you I don’t want to do that I want to do this.” Employee’s can’t do that. Consider the Game Director to be just like a movie director. He should talk to the Art Director to get the art style he wants for his vision. He should talk to the music director to make sure he gets the music that matches his vision. He should talk to the programmers and make sure they can create his vision and how he needs to adjust it to fit reality. You can’t have the Art Director directing the art separate from the Game Director directing the game. The Game Director should look over the shoulders of each person on the team on a daily basis to see that each person is creating things that fit his vision. He needs to manage everybody so the project is finished on time and so they are always working toward a common goal. If a programmer needs certain artwork by next week the Game Director should make sure somebody is creating that art.

Video:

Short grainy gameplay sequence provided by Artist/Assistant Art Director Benjamin Naumann.

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Playstation, Unseen News

Ted Shred [PC/PlayStation] — Cancelled

Yassine Bakrim

10-03-2026

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Ted Shred is a cancelled skateboarding action-adventure game that was in development by Digital Domain for PC and PlayStation. The game was scheduled for release at Christmas 1996, but it never happened because Digital Domain couldn’t secure a publisher.

Digital Domain is an American company specialising in visual effects and computer animation, originally founded in 1993 by three masterminds: James Cameron, Scott Ross, and Stan Winston. While the company experienced a successful period working in the motion picture industry, they once decided to try their hand at something else: making a video game. That’s where the early seeds of Ted Shred came to life.

The intended story revolved around a real estate tycoon who wants to take Ted’s island, Loki Loco, by trashing and ruining it so he can acquire it cheaply with the help of his minions. It’s up to Ted to stop them.

Below are a couple of videos and images documenting what Ted Shred could have been.

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Credit: Lost Media Mines

PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

Dead Unity [PC / PSX – Cancelled]

monokoma

04-01-2025

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Dead Unity is a cancelled futuristic Sci-Fi Action/Survival Horror game that was in development from 1996 to 1998 by Aramat Productions and would have been published by THQ for the PC and the Playstation. According to former developers, the gameplay was somewhat of a “sci-fi Resident Evil clone“.

The game placed the player as an enhanced human, named Works, in the city of Unity who has to survive from deadly cyborgs and robots from a computer generated Artificial Intelligence called Global Mediation Machine who went berserk.

Dead Unity was officially announced in February 1997 by THQ, following a deal with Aramat Productions, as we can read on IGN:

T*HQ announced Friday that it has signed an agreement with entertainment software developer, Aramat Productions Inc., to develop and publish Dead Unity, a 3-D science-fiction adventure game.
The game is promised to be an immersive, real-time 3D adventure game, set in alternate universe.
Dead Unity should be released in first quarter, 1998.

Further details were shared, again by THQ, at E3 of the same year during the publisher’s line-up announcement:

Dead Unity^™ – For the Sony PlayStation, PC CD-ROM, scheduled to be launched 1998 – A 3-D rendered graphic adventure that submerges players in an alternate reality where they assume the identity of the artificially enhanced human, Works, as he attempts to power down the massive computer core of the global mediation machine.

In October 1997, an issue from Computer Games Strategy Plus detailed features and background about the project:

(…) You play Works, an “artificially enhanced human” who must power down the immense computer core of an unfathomable global mediation machine. In an alternate reality, you will face 9-foot tall metal giants called Fleshies, as well as the masterful and diabolical core of the computer itself, in a blowout showdown shoot-em up. Works may choose from over 100 weapons and enhancements that he may interchange at the touch of an ARM (Automatic Reconfigurable Munitions). That’s over 100 ways to slice, dice, maim, mutilate, impale, mangle and cripple over 30 original enemy characters. Based upon the player’s choices, there are multiple story outcomes. The game utilizes a “unity-engine” for 3-D movement through over 400 rendered scenes including environments such as an underground dam, a robot assembly plant carved out of a mountain and a 250 story skyscraper. It also features dynamically changing environments, such as breaking windows, bullet holes in walls and day to night lighting shifts.

After that, Dead Unity didn’t reappear until May 1998 for another THQ’s line-up announcement:

“Dead UnityÔ “ The new standard in real-time, 3D rendered graphic adventures, “Dead Unity” immerses players in a futuristic world of fast-paced action and hair-raising suspense with its extremely detailed story, enthralling characters, riveting game play and unsurpassed graphic quality. (Scheduled for launch in October 1998.)

The issue from August 1998 of Playstation Magazine was the last one in which the game was mentioned before totally disappearing from the surface for years.

In August 2010, the blog of CanOfTheRelics, shared two videos of the game alongside development stories from an Aramat’s anonymous ex-developer:

There are no Playable demos floating around. All the screenshots you seen in magazine ads, THQ promos…they were all mock ups. I designed the story for the project which was very complex, I was also Art Director and eventually producer on it before THQ pulled the plug with it. Long story short, Aramat was a new company and we had some really green programmers. It took over a year just to get a simple animation exporter out of them let alone AI, physics, game logic, etc…
The first E3 we put together that Video Demo that ran on monitors. The second year we “almost” had something remotely playable…but the owner of the company derailed my efforts to get actual game play in place in favor of having animated texture overlays to make spinning fans on screen and pretty much single handedly destroyed our chances with salvaging our relationship with THQ. The demo was full of bugs and you couldn’t even play it.
After I got back from E3 that year, I washed my hands of the project and started working on Arch Gothic. I put together a technology demo for it to show the rest of the company how it was done. With that technology they did manage to finish a working build for Dead Unity with a character traversing through a few rooms with weapons and some rudimentary AI…but it was too little too late. THQ pulled funding for the project and the company went under. Myself and 2 others primary to the company at that time have what was that playable build, but there is nothing floating around. You need special hardware just to play these builds and there isn’t much there. A hall and a couple connecting rooms with some robots in them.
There was a ton of art made…that’s really all that was done on it the whole time it was in development. The engineering staff just spun their wheels through most of production.
So that’s basically the story…

Very few information seems to be available about Dead Unity’s development company. Aramat Productions was established in Wilsonville, Oregon, in June 1996 by Dane Emerson, who previously worked at Nintendo of America and Lobotomy Software. According to his LinkedIn profile, the company counted 29 people in total and worked on PC, PlayStation and Sega Saturn projects for THQ, but also Playmates Interactive. By searching for other LinkedIn profiles, we can learn that Aramat had numerous cancelled projects, most of them still totally unknown to this day. Alongside the mysterious Arch Gothic mentionned above, we could add, for instance, that Jon Ediger, who was Software Engineer for 7 months within the company, indicates having worked on a “Sony PlayStation RPG video game” until February 1999, while 3D Artist Mark Thurow and Level Artist Brian Pape indicates having worked on Decopolis, a project “essentially similar to ‘Dead Unity’” according to Thurow. Jesse Perrin who was Game & Tools Programmer during his time at Aramat worked on “Femme Fatale: a Tekken clone“. Finally, John Stenersen, who was Technical Director from 1996 to 1998 for Aramat, depicted this period as a less than complimentary memory:

Unwittingly, I was hired to manage a group of under-educated, non-professional, inexperienced programmers and high school dropouts in an attempt to create an all-female character fighting game for the Playstation (Femme Fatale). The publisher collapsed and the game was cancelled. We then focused on a DirectX 5 horror game similar to Alone in the Dark (Dead Unity) but only managed the first design milestone when it became clear the company would shutter soon.

Still according to Dane Emerson’s LinkedIn profile, it seems Aramat Productions ceased operations in December 1999. In the end, the company never produced any games.

Dead Unity images:

Decopolis images:

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Dreamcast, Playstation, Sega, Sony

Fortris [PC/Playstation/Dreamcast – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

09-03-2024

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Fortris is a cancelled 2D puzzle/tower-defense hybrid game developed by Promethean Designs around 2000, for the PC, Playstation and Dreamcast systems.

The game was first revealed in June 2000 by IGN:

Promethean Designs wants to deliver on the carnal need of medieval warfare, but mixed generously with the frantic puzzle play. This new project called Fortris is an arcade-like battle game combining the action of games like Artillery or Worms, strategy and fabled setting of a Warcraft or Myth, and puzzle challenges of Tetris or Atari‘s Rampart.
The gameplay in Fortris seems straight-forward and potentially addictive beyond control. Each round of the game begins with a Building sequence where Towers, Parapets, Armaments, and other castle pieces drop from the sky. Magic Blocks will also appear, so make the best use of them to fit your strategy. A well-crafted design will not only help in play, but also reward the creator with bonuses if the blocks used create combo — you can earn yourself extra cannons and wizards if the castle is brilliantly fashioned. Players will have to work frantically to erect a proper fortress with a solid foundation and plenty of defense positions.
Only a limited amount of time is offered to build the fortifications, and suddenly the war explodes. Assailants will have access to magic spells as well as traditional attack units, and will also be able to send out soldiers (called Twerps) to storm the castle. Twerps come in several varieties — Grunts, Soldiers, Medics, Archers, ect. — and players will have to wisely deploy their forces for maximum attack power without losing their own base. As in any good combat situation, rebuilding and refortification is a big part of the strategy, as each side only has a limited crew to parse out. All the while, the gates are being bombarded, the outer walls are cascading down, the Twerps are dying off, and the foundation is caving.
Essentially an arcade strategy game, Fortris will thicken the strategy by shifting levels as players go along. Gameplay begins in the beginning of time, but as the game moves on and the Twerps evolve, the battles become more advanced, more challenging, and more harrowing. Beginning in the Ice Age World, the game eventually runs through to the Stone Age, Medieval Times, and Space Age. Each game level has new weapons, spells, and Twerps to control. Also, the fortresses you build in Fortris become increasingly complex, and with it comes new challenges in both the Building and Attack stages.
Promethean Designs is currently in negotiations with publishers regarding Fortris, and the game is only in demo stages right now (these shots are from PC versions of the game). The PlayStation version will feature the split-screen action seen in some of these shots, as well as comical sequences where the Twerps are being taught the finer points of the Art of War. (…) Either way, this game will be and addictive and seemingly deep puzzle experience, with plenty of warfare action, magical pizzaz, and tactical excitement to spice the brew.

However, in January 2001, it was announced that the development of Fortris was given to Majesco Entertainment, which quickly decided to make the game exclusively for the Game Boy Advance and rebranded it as Fortress. It was developed by internal’s Majesco development studio Pipedream Interactive and released in August 2001.

It is, to this day, unknown why Promethean Designs gave the development to Majesco. We can speculate that the company faced financial troubles during this period as their last game was Aqua GT, released a year prior, and that they decided to salvage this title, before shutting down.

Strangely enough, in May 2022, PC Wizard shared on Twitter/X a 3D map screenshot of what was claimed to be the second version of the game during its development. According to him, the 2D version that was eventually released on GBA was the first version developed by another unnamed game development company. It was then given to Promethean Designs, which decided to turn it into a full 3D game. It is still unclear how far this version went into development, nor who’s right between video game magazines of the time which claimed that the 2D version was developed by Promethean, or PC Wizard’s claimings.

Images:

Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

Youngblood: Search and Destroy [PC / PSX – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

21-10-2023

3 Comments

Youngblood: Search and Destroy is a cancelled action/Role-Playing game published by GT Interactive Software and developed by Realtime Associates around 1997-1998, for the PC and the Playstation. It was based on the comic-book of the same name.

The game featured in various magazines from the Summer of 1997. Electronic Gaming Monthly #97 wrote:

Based on the popular comic book, Youngblood uses the power of the Playstation to give gamers a title that looks similar to Crusader: No Remorse. (…) Control one of the main characters from Youngblood in an isometric view. (…) Pick one character to control or form a group of two to four.

Game Informer #52 told us:

While most would think this title should be strictly action, GT is filling the game with less action and more RPG elements. (…) At times, the game does resemble Project Overkill, but otherwise, you’ll be controlling a party of characters, and the battles will be turn-based.

GT Interactive’s former producer Kurt Busch explained in the issue 31 of Next Generation that they initially planned to make the title a First-Person RPG, before trying a 3rd person action game, somewhat similar to Tomb Raider, and finally taking an approach much more similar to Diablo:

Initially, I felt very strongly we should do this as a first-person RPG (…). But the more we thought about it, the more we realized it would be very difficult to do it because you want to show off the characters, and in first-person we couldn’t work out the right set of views so players could see who was beside them. In the end, it just wasn’t very satisfying. (…) The problem with doing a Tomb Raider-style, third-person game, was that the main attraction of the license was not in any single character, but in the interaction of the team, and at the time trying to do it with six people on the screen all running around just wasn’t appetizing – the interface was just very, very difficult to design. I think the best way I can describe this is as a Playstation version of Diablo, except you control more than one character. You have a team, and you build your team up.

On Playstation Museum, we can read more details:

Get Ready To Rage!
Enter a radical gaming evolution blending a full-on assault of real-time combat action with elements of strategic role-playing. Badrock, Diehard, Riptide, Battlestone, Chapel… Youngblood takes on the most grotesque gauntlet of abominations a DNA experiment ever spewed out. Guide 11 heroes on a series of complex, real-time missions from secret labs to the depths of hell itself! Counter Giger. Find the Drachma codex. Oh yeah… and save the world!
Features:
Guide the Youngblood team through 11 real-time missions that combine pulse-pounding action with strategic role-playing elements.
Battle through dense jungles, parched deserts, and smoldering volcanoes to the very pits of hell as mutant enemies grow more bizarre and violent.
You must destroy them before the evil Giger and the traitor, Dr. Leviticus, finds the Drachma Codex, the secret to global domination.
Players can build, train, and hone the skills of the team members.
Take direct control of any hero or command an entire squadron.
Employ R&D to create powerful, new super weapons.
2-player cooperative option, real-time combat action, and more.

Still according to Playstation Museum, it seems the game was cancelled due to major technical issues, as late former programmer Eric Peterson wrote:

There were three things that really killed it. One was the AI, and one was memory. They had a fairly cute system for pathfinding, but they ran out of memory and made the pathfinding map one-fourth the resolution of the displayed landscape, botching it. Basically no AI movement worked, after that. It would have been a huge task to carve it out and put in something that worked, and I was steeling myself up for it when, mercifully, the end came. Fixing the AI would have meant fixing the memory management, which was huge and hideous. For example, the audio system used 1/8 of the PlayStation’s memory just for its data structure — that’s with no audio samples loaded.
Another, more technical problem, was the cavalier attitude that was taken with handling global variables in the code. All the character code modules were just copies of each other with minor changes, so global variables were declared many times. The worst side effect of this was when global pointers came into play — the very first example I looked at had a global pointer declared six times with four different data types, which was then referenced (extern-ed) in twelve more modules in six different types. The poor compiler didn’t know which one you were talking about, so it just used (I believe) the last one processed as it worked its way through a build. This means that any of the declared variables could be the one used in any particular build of that code module, with no way to tell which it was. General instability and hard-to-find bugs were the result. Trying to chase down the thousands of global variable collisions were what took all the time.
Remember, this monstrosity was nine times the size of the biggest thing I’d ever worked on, Mechwarrior 2. The sheer amount of code made any major surgery a monumentous undertaking. The way it was written made practically everything major surgery.

He added on Lost Levels forums:

Youngblood was something like 2 years in development when the lead programmer quit. I was brought in to salvage the project.
I designed and wrote most of MechWarrior 2. Youngblood, a 2D tiler, was nine times the size and had six times as many modules. There was one spot where there was an “#ifdef Playstation”, followed by a bunch of code, and then an “#ifdef Macintosh” (ditto), and an “#ifdef Saturn” thrown in there somewhere, and SIX THOUSAND LINES DOWNSTREAM was the “#endif” with no comment.
It probably took months to do, and none of it was even getting compiled.
I did a quick couple of tests. At least ninety percent of the comments were wrong, because all the modules were just copied from one another. He’d write some horrible buggy thing, and then (this is not an exaggeration) make 27 copies of it, one for each character.
When I first tried to compile it, MSDev gave 3500 warnings.
Youngblood originally took a minute and a half to load to the title screen, and would leak several tens of megabytes. Pro Tip: don’t null a pointer before you free it. Especially in 27 different modules.

A former animator corroborated:

I think Eric already addressed this issue in his assessment. Like he said it ran out of memory in the pathfinding for A.I. and the resolution of the environment maps suffered for it.

A demo for the PC was made available in some video games magazines, and is still playable today. You can download it here.

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