As we can read from this article from Kotaku, it seems that Valve decided to cut a couple of characters from the original Left 4 Dead 2 cast, changing them with 2 other ones that look more appropiate:
Two characters that didn’t make it into the final version were a female DMV worker-amiable, not stereotypically surly-and a fireman, someone who would know how to expertly use those axes players can now pick up for melee attacks.
But the scrapped DMV employee just wasn’t turn out to be as interesting as originally hoped, dashing Faliszek’s dreams of being able to appeal to real-life DMV workers that he “was the guy who put a nice DMV employee into our game.”
That firefighter just didn’t seem to fit into the world of Left 4 Dead, Faliszek said, not like the new cast, a group of Survivors who will have a more noticeable arc.
Sadly they did not released any image of the 2 removed characters…
The original Unreal is a FPS developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes, released for PC by GT Interactive in May 1998. A playstation port was in development by Pterodactyl Software with new exclusive levels and weapons, but it seems that Infogrames decided to cancel the project for some reasons.
In may 2009 Leo from the Beyond Unreal community was able to get in contact with Kagle, a developer that worked on Unreal PSX: Kangle decided to share some unfinished maps from this unreleased game and Leo edited the original files to make them to work with Unreal PC. Those files can now be downloaded in here, to be preserved and played by the fans!
Here’s a little description of the 2 beta levels:
In the first level, you break into an archaeological excavation where they are digging out a giant alien ship that was buried millenia ago. In part 1, you run across to the ship and turn on its main generator. The generator activates a laser that was removed from the ship and lets you blast through to the elevator shaft to the lower level. In part 2, you have to activate an umbilical tube to connect to the ship, which lets you reach the bottom of the excavation, where you can get inside.
In part two, you enter the ship, which is an alien universe, to contact the alien (I think his name was J’Rath). In part 1, you find yourself in a 3D maze. You have to travel to the end of the maze by removing the barriers blocking you. Each barrier can be removed by going to one of the small pocket worlds and throwing a switch. In part 2, you have to reach the heart of the ship, a pulsing sphere. You follow a short path, fighting tiny monsters and turning switches, until you can get inside. Inside the heart is a series of chambers you have to swim through until you get to J’Rath’s chamber (he appears as a giant eye). The second set of levels is rougher than the first.
These two missions (broken into two pieces each) were set to be played at the end of the second of three acts in the game. Since these levels were so late in the game, they were designed to be difficult for the player to complete.
Since these levels were designed for the PlayStation 1, the levels had to be scaled down to fit into the existing hardware. The limitations placed on the levels were quite draconian and included: a maximum of 3000 polygons per level, low number of visible polygons per room (STAT FPS), a maximum of 3 monsters per room and fewer in rooms with high polygons.
With such restrictions in place, I agreed to create levels with a less combative and more puzzle-oriented approach. In order to avoid large-scale combats, emphasis was placed on jumping puzzles. Levels were organized so the player would have to return to the same locations repeatedly to save space and give the impression of longer gameplay.
Huge props to Leo and Kagle for preserving these lost levels and sharing them with the community!
This game developed by Silicon Knights was released in June 2002 only after a long and troubled development. Full of unseens like few other games, Eternal Darkness was first announced for the Nintendo 64 at E3 1999 and then moved to the GameCube. The original project was changed many times during its development: in addition to the transition from one console to another, at least a couple of chapters were removed and the story was shortened when Silicon Knights realized that it would not be possible to finish the game before the release date. >> Read the full article.
As we can read from Wikipedia, Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia is a text adventure game created by Cognetics Corporation, written by award-winning science fiction author Thomas M. Disch. The game was acquired and produced by Don Daglow and published by Electronic Arts (EA) in 1986 for the MS DOS PC and Apple II systems.
Robert Seddon has linked us to Jason Scott’s weblog, in which we can read about the “beta” version of Amnesia, that “was originally supposed to be released by book publisher Harper & Row, but that was cancelled”. It seems that part of the original story was cut from the final game, for space limitations. The original game’s manuscript created by Disch was preserved and shared thanks to Stephane. As we can read from Jason’s blog:
To be clear: this is not a novel, this is not a script in the sense most people think of a play or a shooting script. This is a specification outline for an interactive fiction, where the descriptions Disch works in are meant to be manipulated by the player in the process of exploring a world.
This is an interesting piece of gaming history and it’s nice to know that it was possible to save it from being lost forever. Huge props to Stephane and Jason for sharing their find and thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!
John Pickford and Ste Pickford are brothers, and, even if maybe you don’t know it yet, they developed many of your favorite games from the ’80 & ‘90. In their career they worked for Elite, Acclaim, Infogrames, Rare, Nintendo, Sony.. and in all those years, some of their projects were cancelled or changed a lot before the release date.
Robert Seddon linked us to the official Pickford Brothers’s website, in which they share almost every day a new piece of history from their developers-life, with info and images about some of those games that remained unseen, until now! Checking their archive we can find a lot of interesting stuff, here are some exaples:
Spyral Saga: A large, ambitious adventure game for the PlayStation, for Sony Europe. The concept started life as the sequel to SNES Equinox (itself the sequel to NES Solstice, both developed for Sony Japan), but only the isometric viewpoint and adventure genre were kept, no storyline continuity. The game got bogged down in development difficulties, and was eventually canned after Ste had left Software Creations to start Zed Two.
This is one of many pieces of concept art I did for our game Plok, which eventually came out on the SNES in the early 90s.
We originally started the game under the title Fleapit, for Rare’s ‘Razzboard’ coin-op hardware, but that fell through when our first studio Zippo Games closed, even though the game was a fair way through development.
We kept working on the idea, and by the time we got the game underway as a SNES game at Software Creations, we had masses of sketches and drawings and ideas for baddies and environments.
Blade & Barrel (Nintendo 64): A game originally designed to be simple, 3D update of the old Atari console classic Combat, but which changed to an on-rails shooter once it was signed to a Japanese publisher after John left Software Creations to form Zed Two. In the end the game either abandoned or ‘canned’ by publisher.
Mario Artist: Paint Studio / Sound Studio: Originally intended as a single product – a sequel to Mario Paint in 3D for the N64 – this eventually saw light as multiple Japanese only products released for the N64 and the 64DD disk drive system.
Software Creations were initially asked to pitch a concept to Nintendo of America for a Mario Paint style product for the N64. John came up with a concept based on living 3D environments where the user could mess about with the creatures in the world – both editing the textures on the models themselves, and modifying the parameters of entities themselves – the physical size of a dinosaur, say, and its other visual attributes, as well as its AI properties such as aggression, speed etc. The result would be living playground where the player could mess around and play God.
The project was caught up in political infighting between NOA and Nintendo of Japan over who was controlling the project, and eventually the Japanese took control and rejected many of the ideas which had been accepted enthusiastcally by the Americans, steering the project in a different direction after John left Software Creations to form Zed Two, and throwing away loads of work.
If you have some free time you could find many more unseen games hidden between the pages of Pickford Brothers’s website, we’ll try to add those in the U64 Archive in the next few months. Huge props to John and Ste for sharing all those info and thanks to Robert for the link!
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