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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Glover was a 3D platformer game developed by Interactive Studios Ltd and released for the Nintendo 64 and Playstation in 1998. A sequel was announced for Nintendo 64, Playstation and Dreamcast with a launch originally slated for mid 1999, but was later cancelled.
In 2010, NESworld recovered a playable beta of the Nintendo 64 version of Glover 2 and by October 2011, the ROM was leaked online.
Thanks to Nesworld and Goomther for the contributions!
On February 25, 2015, James Steele, a programmer formerly of Interactive Studios, released a blog entry detailing the unusual circumstances which led to the cancellation of the game. According to the developer, a huge misstep at Hasbro involving one worker severely over-estimating the amount of cartridges required for the game blemished the Glover name at the company, ultimately resulting in the discontinuation of its sequel:
“…as far as we were told, Glover 2 had been canned because of Glover 1. Now this seems strange, because the first Glover has sold fairly well for a non-Nintendo N64 title. And it was on the back of those sales that Glover 2 had been given the go-ahead at Hasbro in the first place.
But Hasbro had messed up. They had screwed the pooch big time. You see, when ordering the carts for the first game, the standard production run was something like 150,000 units. And this is what the management at ISL had advised Hasbro to order – because the N64 wasn’t really fairing that well compared to the PS1 at the time and non Nintendo titles tended to sell poorly. They thought that Glover was a good game in its own right, and a moderate 3rd party success would sell around 150,000 units. And that is exactly what happened. Hence the go ahead for the sequel.
So Glover was a money maker for Hasbro, right? Right? Nuh-uh. As it happened, Nintendo had a special on N64 carts at the time the game was being schedule for production. Some bright spark at Hasbro thought it would just be absolutely SUPER to order double the normal amount – so they put in an order 300,000 units at a slightly reduced cost.
The problem was that none of the retailers wanted to take that stock off Hasbro’s hands. The game had been moderately successful, but the demand just wasn’t there. And thus Hasbro was left with 150,000 or so copies of Glover for the N64 that nobody wanted. That’s something like half-a-million dollars worth of stock that they can’t shift. And with Hasbro Interactive not being in the best of financial shape Glover became a dirty word around the company, as it became apparent over the course of Glover 2 development that they were stuck with all those carts.
Of course, the blame was put on the game and brand itself rather than the idiot who ordered the extra 150,000 carts from Nintendo. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Glover 2 had been cancelled.”
According to Steele, who we later caught up with, the game was around 80-85% complete at the time development ceased.
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Spider: The Video Game (or just simply Spider in Europe) is a game developed by Boss Game Studios and available on the PlayStation platform. The game was published by Eidos Interactive, publishers perhaps most famous for the Tomb Raider series. Upon its release the game seemed to fly under the radar, and received limited critical response. The game is now particularly difficult to attain, and has become somewhat of a rarity. [Info from Wikipedia] In an old preview for the game, we can see that Spider was referred as
Wikipedia has some information about the beta version of MKT:
Top left: An UMK3-style menu.
Top right: An early version of the character selection screen. The screen used the UMK3 character selection screen as base, and Rain’s and Noob Saibot’s portraits are replaced by a pallete swapped version of Sub-Zero’s MKII portrait (Rain), and Reptile’s MKII portrait (Noob). Johnny Cage is not present.
Bottom left: Scorpion beats Smoke in the Portal arena. Note that Scorpion’s life bar text is different to Smoke’s life bar text (UMK3 Saturn, and later, MKT N64 didn’t remove this.) Also, the lightning all the way in the back of the Portal is viewed, but the PSX, PC, and Saturn version scrapped that. Only the N64 used it. And, the floor of the stage is crooked.
Bottom right: Baraka beats Raiden.
Originally there was another Logo they used but then replaced it with the current one. It had pieces of all the mortal kombat games before MKT.
More on Johnny Cage: He was the only character that wasn’t going to appear in MKT. The actor that did his MOCAP in MK2 was fired for advertising with another company, using his role as Johnny Cage. Midway then decided to use another actor for Johnny Cage, which would make him the only character in MKT to use new sprites.
At first there were only to be 29 characters and 26 backgrounds. In the end there were 30 characters and 29 backgrounds for the N64. More for the other systems, however.
Also, Rain was originally supposed to be a character called Tremor. In earlier versions of the game, Tremors bio would show from some sort of glitch only with Rains name.
His bio was:
Rain is an assassin working freelance. He was once a member of the Lin Kuei along with Sub-Zero, but left the clan under mysterious circumstances. Years later, Rain is found working for Shao Kahn as an assassin in the Outworld. Born a human, he finds himself questioning his loyalty towards Kahn after watching the invasion of Earth.
Thanks to Zero7 and Sir_Brando for the contributions!
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In the Youtube channel of FF8demo there are a couple of videos that show unused scenes from FF8. In the descriptions we can read that: “Some stuff was never used in the final version of the game. This was taken from the “Final Fantasy VIII Preview Disc” that came with FF7.”
Some of the differences that we can find in these videos are:
Thanks a lot to Robert Seddon and JargonJohn for these infos!
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