Unseen News

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! 

N+ is an awesome hardcore platform game developed by Metanet Software, released for Xbox Live Arcade, DS and PSP. Robert Seddon linked us to an interview that Game Developer magazine had with the developers of the Xbox Live Arcade version and the problems that they had to include the level editor in the final game.

“Microsoft supported the idea but expressed a very reasonable need to limit users from creating offensive content such as hate speech, representations of male genitalia, offensive language, and so on. The problem was that severe limitations would cripple the user’s ability to create interesting content, negating the editor’s reason for being. […]

Because of limitations of the leaderboard system, Microsoft was unable to delete the specific offensive content uploaded by a user of Forza, which could also not be flagged by other users, and was resolvable only by the deletion of the entire user account.

Near the end of N+ development, we were told to disable the content-sharing features for launch, with the suggestion that they could be re-enabled when and if the leaderboard back-end was altered to allow effective user-created-content control.

We complied, regretting the backlash that would surely occur, but were optimistic for the future when we could re-enable. Unfortunately, this last-minute change caused a certification failure, and a lengthy launch delay for N+, but we worked to get through the new issues.

We pushed to keep developing content creation and sharing in because we knew it would benefit everyone: the game would be more popular because players would appreciate the creative possibilities, and it would add a lot of value to N+ as available levels would become essentially infinite.

Perhaps, though, we should have just cut it when Microsoft initially started expressing reservations. It was a lot of work for everyone, and since there was a chance that it would be cut, it’s possible this was a case of poor risk management on our part. As it stands, this feature is not likely to be allowed any time soon, if ever.”

You can read the full interview at Game Set Watch and check an interesting presentation about the development of the game from the official Slick Entertainment site!