As you probably know Gremlins is a 1984 comedy horror film directed by Joe Dante and released by Warner Bros, a commercial success spawning a sequel and lots of merchandise. A few officially licensed video games were published for Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Game Boy Color, Wii and DS. A Playstation 2 Gremlins was in development in the mid ‘00s, but soon cancelled.
Many years later, Krome Studios (mostly known for Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Spyro: A New Beginning) pitched another Gremlins video game, planned for Xbox 360. In the end the game was not green lighted by Warner Bros, and it became another cancelled Gremlins game we’ll never play. A few screenshots were found by fans of the series, preserved in the gallery below to remember the existence of this lost project.
A former Krome developer shared some details on this pitch on NeoGAF:
“[…] you played ad gizmo running around hiding from adult gremlins setting up elaborate rude goldberg – incredible machine style physics traps to kill them in all sorts of gruesome ways. Even had a little street scene modelled of the town in the first movie with snow and Xmas lights, gremlins everywhere running amuck overturning cars and shit.”
Swingin’ Ape Studios were a mostly forgotten studio behind the now cult-classic titleMetal Arms: Glitch in the System, a third-person shooter published by Vivendi Universal and Sierra Entertainment in late 2003, for Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube. While the game did not sold much, many gamers loved it for its fun gameplay and multiplayer. Around 2004 after Metal Arms was shipped, Swingin Ape Studios proposed many different projects to publishers: Metal Arms 2, a new SWAT (Police Quest), a GI-Joe tie-in, and a game called “Guerrilla: Jungle Revolt”, to be developed as an exclusive launch title for Microsoft’s soon-to-be released Xbox 360.
All of these projects were never released, but a few details were shared online thanks to former Swingin Ape developers. Guerrilla: Jungle Revolt was initially conceived as a Mad Max inspired post-apocalyptic coop shooter, but when the team approached Electronic Arts to pitch the project they suggested to change it into a military shooter set on an island, somehow similar to Far Cry. EA knew the talent of the studio and maybe they were interested in publishing Guerrilla as a new IP to contrast Crytek / Ubisoft FPS series.
Swingin’ Ape Studios re-worked their game pitch as suggested by EA, but then proposed it to Microsoft instead. The company though to make Guerrilla an important launch title for their “Xbox 2”, along with other games such as Call of Duty 2, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero and Quake 4.
Swingin Ape had already worked on an early prototype for Guerrilla using their original Xbox dev-kits: it was playable in local multiplayer on four linked Xbox consoles. This proto was enough to demonstrate basic gameplay mechanics with cooperative on-foot and vehicle combat against AI, but Guerrilla’s concept was much more than a simple FPS.
They planned a free-roaming set of islands, with base-building elements, squad commands and seamless integration of online play. We can imagine Guerrilla’s gameplay as a small open-world in the vein of Just Cause, where you could create your own military base, explore the environment to find enemies and attack their own camps. From slides used to pitch the project to Microsoft we can read more details about their idea:
Free roaming access to the 3 islands of Panuba
Access grows wider as the game progresses
Panuba has diverse regions: cities, jungles, dunes, snowy peaks, ruins, volcanic plains
Interactive and alive with islanders walking / driving around, birds reacting to gunshots, destructible environments, etc.
Up to 3 Live players may seamlessly join another player’s campaign on-the-fly
Coop players may bring their squads with them
Other players may became mercenaries, free to roam the island and play against the main player
Dozens of vehicles available on ground, water and in air
Acquire vehicles trough base buildings, by stealing or by earning
Microsoft offered to Swingin Ape 3 months of funds to develop a Guerrilla prototype on the Xbox 360, as an initial contract to test its potential. While the team was excited for this opportunity, something unexpected happened: Blizzard proposed them to work on their StarCraft: Ghost project, recently removed from its original team (Nihilistic Software).
In the end accepting Blizzard offer was their best option, as they were willing to fund a few years of development for StarCraft: Ghost, compared to just 3 months for Microsoft on the Guerrilla prototype (without knowing what could happen next). Guerrilla was then halted, to focus on the new collaboration with Blizzard.
The rest is history: While work on StarCraft: Ghost proceeded, in May 2005 Blizzard Entertainment decided to fully acquire Swingin’ Ape for their talent. After a while StarCraft: Ghost was also put on indefinite hold and never completed, while the Swingin Ape team became officially part of Blizzard, working on such projects as World of Warcraft.
Hanasaki Gassen (in Japanese, literally translated as “Flower Blooming Competition”) is a cancelled real-time strategy game for GBA that was in development by Blue Planet Software (AKA Bulletproof Software), the same company that created the original Tetris for Game Boy and today act as the exclusive agent for The Tetris Company.
The project was officially announced as one of the first games in development for the GameBoy Advance and it was being funded and published by Nintendo themselves. It would have been one of their major titles to be shown at E3 2001, but that never happened: Hanasaki Gassen vanished and was forgotten forever by most Nintendo fans.
Unfortunately Nintendo never shown any image nor screenshots from this lost game. We tried to get in contact with former Blue Planet Software developers who worked on the game, but with no luck. The few details remaining to remember the existence of this cancelled project are a few online resumes.
“There were many factors that the AI needed to evaluate, and simulated annealing was used to allow the AI to learn strategies by playing itself overnight, adjusting its internal weights until the best strategy was found. The AI could thus adjust to changing game rules, and even discover new strategies! It was written in C++ with STL for the GBA.”
From this info and its japanese title we can speculate Hanasaki Gassen was going to be a flower-themed strategy game …with different type of flowers and seeds fighting against each other to conquer the garden? Its Artificial Intelligence could have been quite impressive and ambitious for a GBA game, with… enemies learning new strategies overnight while you were asleep? That sounds cool.
We hope one day we could save more details about Hanasaki Gassen and maybe some screenshots too. If you know someone who worked at Blue Planet Software, please let us know!
Dark Matter is a cancelled space combat simulator that was in development for PC by a forgotten team known as “Nanotainment” around the late ‘90s. It seems the game was shown in playable form at E3 1999 & 2000, but only a few websiteswrote about it at the time.
From the old Nanotainment website we can read some more details about the ambitious concept they planned for their project:
“Dark Matter offers a new paradigm in space combat sims. Whereas before one was restricted to a single ship and battles of limited size, Dark Matter offers you the chance to pilot any of the hundreds of ships in a battle at any time. Couple this with fast paced arcade action, 8 different species with different ship types and abilities, dynamic environments, and dramatic scale, and you get the amazing game play of Dark Matter. You can play the game any way you want, from pure arcade simulation to detailed tactical control, it’s up to you. Dark Matter, a new game for the next age.”
Large Scale Combat: Hundreds of ships fighting all at once.
Massive Scale: From 10m long fighters to 4km long capital ships.
Fight as one of 8 species, each with different abilities and characteristics.
Fast paced, frenzied engagements.
Access to all ships on your side: Fight as a lowly fighter, patrolling corvette or titanic capital ship.
Give ship-level commands and species-wide orders.
Over 40 spacecraft you can pilot.
Campaign and a single battle mode.
Play the way you want: Play as an action game or a strategy game.
Arcade or simulation flight models.
Intense Environments: Fight in an asteroid field, minefield, or nebula. Or near a black hole.
Dynamic Environment: Watch asteroids split into smaller asteroids.
Alien Artifacts: Find ancient alien artifacts that may turn the tide of the battle.
Genetic AI: Learning opponents that develop unique strategies.
Tradable AI: Trade your specific AI with your friends.”
“1.) Thanks for taking time out to answer these questions, first off what is the coolest feature that is planned in the full release?
Bob: The coolest feature of the game is its perspective: you are a species instead of a single pilot. This feature gives you access to all the ships in your fleet which gives you quick access to the action (by switching to a ship on the front line) and access to the overall strategy (by switching to a capital ship). It also extends play. You’re not done until your whole fleet is toast.
Chad: I think that probably the most unique feature is the ability to switch to any ship on your side of the battle. You will never have to wait to come back in to the battle, another ship will always be at your finger tips.
2.) How do you see this game competing against other games like Descent Freespace 2 which is also very similar and going to be released around the same time?
Chad: I don’t really see us in the same arena with Freespace 2. Yes we are both space sims, but our game has a definite arcade bent to it. We are intentionally keeping the mechanics of the game simple and instead of having a complex story line (as most space games have) which forces you into a single character, we are concentrating on variety of both the ships you can pilot, their abilities, space born hazards and other interesting effects. In Dark Matter, you will have access to any ship on your side, further separating us from the “adventure” game genre. Our game plays out at a much quicker, more furious pace than the average space sim.
3.) What type of single player features will be very prominent in the single player game?
Bob: Our learning AI will be at the forefront of the single-player game. As you get better at Dark Matter, the AI will grow to match you. Since our learning AI is based on genetic algorithms, each AI data set will be unique to the game play that created it. As an added feature, players will be able to trade their AI data so that their friends can see the different techniques and strategies that have evolved.
Chad: The game is functionally the same single or multi player. You have access to the same controls and game types (flag arena, xenocide, etc.), but we are also including a campaign mission set. Most of these missions are structured to teach you the basics of playing that species. Basic strategies and tactics which you can then take on to a multi player game. You can probably expect a lot of low key humor sprucing up the campaign missions.
4.) Will the game feature a very good story line as the single player game progresses on?
Story is really very slim in the game. Each campaign will have a simple story based around an overall theme, but as far as first person character or melodrama is concerned we decided against it. We wanted to do something a little different, thus went with breadth over depth.
5.) How will the multi-player game be interfaced, like how many players supported, what method of connecting players together?
We support all connection types that DirectPlay, which is to say everything. We are looking at getting a gamespy or mplayer interface for games on the internet, so you can probably expect one or the other in the final release. The games are easy to set up, but still gives the players a lot of options. From game types to species and loadout selections. We currently support 32 player in a peer to peer network scheme, but if interest is high enough we could go to a client/server system which would support many more players.
7.) What species is the best and why?
Bob: We are striving to make all the species different yet equal with the appropriate strategy. Some species will have advantages over others but on the whole no species will be the best. Kind of like Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Chad: We have tried to balance the species as best as possible. I will give you a little brief on their specific attributes:
Namoon: Pissed off space monkeys. They are the basic species in the game. Most of their technology centers around missile and anti-missile weaponry.
Graawol: The most primitive race in the game. These guys may not have the finesse of other species, but they more than make up for it in brute force. The have gattling style guns and a mean-ass ramming attack as well as marines which they can use to infiltrate and neutralize enemy corvettes and capital ships.
Ood: The Ood are a race of neurotic, paranoid aliens. They have electronic-counter-measures and a powerful force blast, but being the neurotic race that they are, they have equipped each of their fighters with a kamikaze device. This device will turn the fighter into a rocketing comet. Very devastating to enemy capital ships.
Rekenti: The rekenti are a race of silicon and crystalline based beings. Most of their technology centers around their lightning gun and tractor beam. They are also the race with the Ship Killer.
Machina: What would a space game be without a machine race. The Machina technology centers around, EMP and electronic control weaponry. They are also immune to psychic attacks, because of their machine nature.
Bloom: The Bloom are a strange race from a gas giant. All of their ships are organic based, and all of their weapons are organically created. They have a corrosive liquid projectile which does huge damage to metallic hulls.
Vander: The vander are a race of space gypsies. All of their technology is pirated from other races. Their technology is the most varied, from plasma torpedoes to reflective shields.
Shodikan: The shodikan are the most mysterious race in the game. Their technology is based around cloaking and psychic technology.
9.) Will single player games be mission objective based or will they just be fire at them and destroy all type missions?
We do not have standard space game objectives. Our games are more like first-person shooters in their implementation. Currently we have three game types:
Genocide: Kill all the enemy.
Flag Arena: Capture and hold all the flags in the arena for a certain time duration to win.
Territories: Capture and hold 75% of stationary buoys for a certain time duration to win.”
By looking at how the Dark Matter fact-sheets changed year after year on Nanotainment’s website, we can see the scope of their game was cut, removing 2 playable species and the size of spaceships from 4 km to 2 km. At some point in late 2000, the company vanished with no traces, with Dark Matter cancelled and lost forever.
We don’t know how much of the game was done before the cancellation, but it was at least playable to be featured at E3, so we can hope one day a demo could be found and shared online. It’s interesting to notice that Nanotainment also worked on another forgotten project titled “Fly Hunter”, that seems to have been published in 1998 and you can download a playable version on Archive.org
Becoming a legendary lost game after unconfirmed rumors of screenshots appearing in gaming magazines, Die Hard 64 was one of three Nintendo 64 projects in development by Bits Studios, along with RiQa and Thieves World. Unfortunately, none of them ever saw the light of day on the 64-bit console. Founded in the early ‘90s, Bits Studios released a series of Game Boy and Super Nintendo games, developing a good relationship with Nintendo along the way that lead to a couple of collaboration projects (R-Type DX and Warlocked, published by Nintendo on the Game Boy Color). This relationship with Nintendo blossomed a trilogy of exclusive games conceived for the Nintendo 64.
Of this trilogy, only RiQa was a prominent title at E3 1999, as Die Hard 64 and Thieves World were never officially announced. One of the first mentions of a Die Hard tie-in for Nintendo 64 was published in June 1999 by IGN when they wrote about its publisher:
“[…] Fox Interactive is working on Die Hard 64. In unleashing your cash-making movie machine into the world of videogames, you can’t make the mistake of skipping a console like the N64 and it seems that the folks behind the movie have realized this fact. While the rumor is still brewing, several sources, both stateside and overseas are reporting that a Die Hard project is in the works at Fox Interactive and that the game is scheduled for an early 2000 release.”
“Interested to know what had become of Die Hard 64, we contacted Fox Interactive today and a company representative briefly theorized about the title with us. “The game is just a rumor,” said the Fox spokesperson, “and to be honest with you, I don’t see it coming to fruition.” While this is not a solid confirmation of the game’s termination one way or the other, it definitely doesn’t paint a pretty picture. The fact of the matter is that Fox Interactive’s first foray into Nintendo 64 development, namely Fox Sports College Hoops ’99, backed by an impressive amount of money, turned to disaster when the game failed to sell. And with the industry’s insistence that the 64-bit console is a “dying system,” it isn’t a stretch to conclude that the publisher simply canned the game after determining that the risks involved were not worth any possible profits to be made.”
IGN’s assumption about the fate of the game were quite spot-on and in May 2001 Fox Interactive officially announced “Die Hard: Next Generation”, planned for Nintendo GameCube and developed by Bits Studios. The title was then released as “Die Hard: Vendetta” in 2002 for GameCube, PS2 and Xbox.
The mystery remains (at least until a few years ago): Was Die Hard 64 really in development for Nintendo 64? Was any FPS ever made by Bits Studios on the cartridge-based hardware? While even some former Bits Studios developers did not know about the project (as seen in our interview with Frederic Villain in our book), in 2016 we were able to get in contact with a few people that worked directly on the game, to find out the truth.
We should start this investigation with another IGN article posted in May 2002, where they were able to interview Bits Studios’ CEO Foo Katan and Die Hard: Vendetta producer Mario Aguera, revealing some more details:
“In the past couple of years we have kept a relatively low profile as we have been developing new and existing technologies to make use of the hardware available at our disposal today. Die Hard: Vendetta will justify our hard work in that time. […] we’ve always had a close relationship with Nintendo here at Bits and they first approached us about Project Dolphin in the autumn of 1999. At that point it was purely the hardware specs and they had some demonstrations running through software emulation. We originally started designing the game when the N64 was out, but in Spring 2000 we decided to start our design again for the GameCube. For the first year we were just working with the emulator, hoping that Nintendo would deliver on their promises. Needless to say they did.”
The early Nintendo 64 design for the game started out as an original IP titled “Muzzle Velocity”, a first person shooter in which players would take the role of Jack, a member of a SWAT team during a mission in Los Angeles. In Muzzle Velocity original storyline, the crime wave in LA is out of control and the LAPD cannot stop it on its own. Jack was been sent by Bert, his SWAT leader, to supply the LAPD with backup and neutralize the situation. During the first mission of the game, a bomb detonated in a Hi-Fi store downtown. The owner was refusing to up his “fire insurance” to the gangsters, who in return wrecked his shop. The gangsters have then gone on a looting spree in the surrounding shops. The main mission objectives would have been to clear the area of gangster and minimize innocent casualties.
Muzzle Velocity’s gameplay and controls would have been similar to other classic N64 FPS games, such as GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. Players’ mission objectives in this first level were given by Bert and once in control, they would have been free to move Jack around downtown LA. There would be a few LAPD cops and civilians running around the levels, either running from the fight, defeating bad guys or simply dodging bullets. The buildings in the area would have been mostly shut up, but some would have their shutters half way down, allowing Jack to enter them by crouching into the window; the environment was meant to be interactive and it could have been damaged by players during shootouts. While Jack would start the first mission with a 9mm pistol and SWAT armor, any weapon used by the gangsters could be picked up, such as shotguns and baseball bats.
Muzzle Velocity did not last long once Bits Studios partnered with Fox Interactive to collaborate on a new project. It’s possible that the deal was overseen by Gary Sheinwald, former Bits Studios Development Manager who left to work at Fox as Senior Producer from 1995 to 2001. Because of the partnership with Fox, Muzzle Velocity had to be tied with a movie and initially Speed 2 was proposed.
Dubbed Speed 2: Cruise Control, the game would have been primarily set on a boat, though a bus level was also conceived as a nod to the original film. The game was then planned to release in January 1999 for Nintendo 64 and PC. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you view it) the movie was a huge failure when it released and both companies decided to switch the project once more to another, more successful IP: Die Hard. As an interesting note, the original script for Speed 2 was meant to be Die Hard 3 (“Die Hard with a Vengeance”, codenamed “Troubleshooter”) in a strange case of film development foreshadowing the game development process.
Still being developed as a Nintendo 64 game and using the new TWED engine created by Nathanael Presson and Frederic Villain, a lot of effort was put into creating Die Hard 64. The initial plan was overly ambitious, with 30 or 40 missions planned, but once Steven Goodwin took over as the new lead programmer and explained to the producers how many years they would need to achieve such a huge game, the number was heavily cut down. Only a handful of levels were developed on the Nintendo 64 before the switch to the GameCube, but they still had a good prototype with the minimal gameplay available. This Die Hard 64 prototype was leaked online in August 2017 on the Assembler Games Forum.
Being a N64 game, a 4 player deathmatch mode was also devised, to keep in line with Rare’s multiplayer masterpieces. While years passed, in early 2000 Bits Studios found itself in some issues when RiQa was cancelled and the N64’s life cycle reached its end. Neither Die Hard 64 nor Thieves World were finished yet and it was unlikely that many people would buy a N64 game once they were, as the new generation of consoles were almost out. The studio decided to move their last N64 games to GameCube and significantly upgrade the TWED engine so they could push the tech into the next gen hardware.
Danny Carr took over design duties for the GameCube version and had a new vision for a cinematic game that felt and played like a film, probably preceding the new generation of linear shooters that became popular many years later. Development of the game still took a while to be completed: Carr left the studio in late 2001 and Mario Aguera took the lead. Aguera wanted to add many interesting elements he saw in other (at the time) successful games and movies into the design, a proposal that would lengthen development time even more. For example, the sneak/action modes were inspired by Thief, while the “bullet time” mechanic was taken from The Matrix.
In the end Die Hard took so much time to be released that it looked like Bits Studios copied the “bullet time” mechanic from Max Payne, albeit it was implemented in early prototypes before the release of Remedy’s game. When finally published in 2002, Die Hard: Vendetta was much different from what the team originally conceived in late ‘90s and it only received average reviews.
As it always happens in these cases, we can only dream of an alternate reality where Die Hard 64 was successfully completed and became another masterpiece for our beloved Nintendo 64.
Original Die Hard 64 article published in our book “Video Games You Will Never Play” in 2016, thanks to Amhed for proofreading.
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