Hurikàn is a cancelled action adventure in development by Electronic Arts in 2006, planned to be released for Xbox 360 and PS3. The project was never officially announced by EA and we found out about its existence thanks to concept art leaked online in 2010.
As far as we know Hurikàn was in development by an internal team at EA, and it was one of many pitches for new projects conceived in those years. Other unreleased ideas were Gun Head, a Road Rash reboot and a game based on Oliver Twist.
Hurikàn was set in a weather-beaten island, where a mysterious company was working on top-secret researches. Something went wrong during the experiments (maybe a hurricane hit the island?) and their research center was attacked by robots gone haywire, ocean monsters and… even the weather? Artificially intelligent and remote-controlled machines played a prominent role in the game: some of them could help players and NPCs (for example by saving survivors), while others could be aggressive. We imagine this could have been something like a mix between Jurassic Park and Vanquish.
Unfortunately we don’t know anything else about it and the project was quietly canned in early development. From the few images we preserved in the gallery below, we can just say that Hurikàn could have been quite the cool adventure.
If you know someone who worked on this lost game, please let us know.
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing was a fighting game developed by Midway San Diego and published in 1999 initially for the Dreamcast. In 1998 the same team conceived another similar 3D fighting game, set in old-school sci-fi / fantasy settings.
This cancelled project was titled “X-Fighters” and would have featured such characters as a mad scientist, space-cop girls and warriors from alien planets. Only a few renders of these characters are saved in this page, to preserve the existence of this lost game.
By looking at these models and by reading its title, we can speculate X-Fighters would have been an arcade fighting game, with over-the-top battles between weird characters. Imagine a mix between Power Stone and Star Gladiator. Unfortunately the game was never announced by Midway and there are basically no more details about it.
Midway was one of the most prolific developers on the Dreamcast, with such arcade classics as NBA Showtime, Hydro Thunder, Gauntlet Legends and San Francisco Rush 2049. We can assume X-Fighters would have been another fun title to play with friends on our beloved Dreamcast. In the end the project was never fully developed after their initial pitch. Midway decided to make the team work on a different kind of fighting game, and the result was Ready to Rumble.
If you know someone who worked on this lost project, please let us know!
In the ‘90s Rare was one of the favorite developers for Nintendo fans, publishing such cult classic titles as Donkey Kong Country, Battletoads, GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie. When the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2002 many things changed. In 2010 Scott Henson became the new Rare studio manager and for a few of years they mostly worked on Kinect Sports, Kinect pitches and Xbox Live Avatars for Xbox 360. Unfortunately many of their original ideas for new gamesnever seen the light of day.
“The new studio will be structured in a different way to most, however, and work more along the film production model in which teams scale up and down regularly according to the needs of projects being created.
Among the duties to be undertaken in Fazeley will be testing for Natal products – something which requires more space than traditional Xbox 360 games – while the decision is also part of a bid to stem the relentless increase of development costs over the years.
The process, which is similar in some ways to outsourcing, is labelled “insourcing” by Betteridge, and he cites past successes such as Xbox Live Avatars and the Sky link-up design as projects that were completed in this way.”
“They set up an off-shoot studio in Fazeley. It was where the graphics went. Quite a few people didn’t want to make the move because it’s the centre of Birmingham as opposed to Twycross, which is a bit of a wrench. But I thought, I’m all right, I’ll go for that. So I did that for nearly a year. And I went back to doing graphics again. “
One of Rare’s lost “casual” projects conceived at the Fazeley Studios was some kind of “The Wonderful 101” meets “Monster Hunter” multiplayer adventure, in which players could work together to hunt down huge bosses. You would use you own Avatar as the playable character, dressed-up as superheroes or fantasy knights depending on the settings of the mission. This would have been a “casual” game, but with many epic battles and interesting ideas to hunt down bosses, such as your friends blocking a huge robot while you would try to turn off the switch on its back.
Only some concept art from this lost project is currently preserved on Unseen64, to remember its existence. As far as we know this was never implemented into a playable prototype and could only have been one of the many undeveloped pitches proposed by the Rare team during their “Casual Gaming Years”.
If you know someone who worked at Rare’s Fazeley Studios, please let us know. We’d love to save more memories about their cancelled ideas.
Go Carts is a cancelled racing game planned for Nintendo 64 that was in development by DMA Design, the studio that created such popular games as Lemmings and the first Grand Theft Auto, other than cult titles asSpace Station Silicon Valley andBody Harvest. Before working on the new 64 bit console, DMA already had a successful collaboration with Nintendo on the SNES with Uniracers, an original racing game in which players use unicycles to compete in high-speed tracks while doings tricks to gain more acceleration. In mid ‘90s DMA pitched a new racing project for the yet-to-be-released Ultra 64: Go Carts. Unfortunately it was never released and only a few prototype images remain to remember the existence of this lost project.
The game was never officially announced and probably it was just one of the many ideas that DMA had to develop a new game for Nintendo’s 64 bit console. We can speculate their plan was to create a fun go-kart racing game, somehow similar to Mario Kart, but with a more realistic look and feel. In the end Nintendo did work with DMA Design on a new game, but that game was Body Harvest.
Go Carts was quietly cancelled and we’ll never know what it could have been if only completed.
Chi Yong is a cancelled fighting game in development by Lightspeed Productions for the original Playstation in 1996. This is quite an obscure and forgotten project: we can’t even find any detail about its developers. Chi Yong was officially announced in a few websites and gaming magazines in late 1996. It was meant to be a 4 players fighting game game featuring digitized actors, similar to Mortal Kombat. Some of the actors were even the same.
As we can read in an old press release:
MK Actors to Star in New Fighting Game
Martial arts actors used in the Mortal Kombat series are being digitised again for forthcoming title Chi Yong. HoSang Pak, Daniel Pesina, Katalin Zamier, Phillip Ahn and Liz Malecki all featured in various Mortal Kombat incarnations. They have been picked to show off their martial arts prowess for Lightspeed Productions forthcoming beat-’em up.
Chi Yong (a working title which means ‘spirit of the dragon’) is a four-play multi-tap fighting game for PlayStation. Right now it’s about 20 per cent complete and should be available by the end of this year. A spokesperson for the company commented: “Most of the actors digitized are black belts in martial arts. We feel that using real martial artists with experience gives realism and authenticity to the fighting game.”
The story gets even weirder when you find out that the same actors were already planned to be featured in “Thea Realm Fighters”, a cancelled 1 VS 1 fighting game in development by High Voltage Software for the Atari Jaguar (later leaked online). There’s even a TRF promotional poster given away at E3 1995 in which we can read “ⓒ Lightspeed Productions” written in the bottom-left. We don’t know what kind of relationship High Voltage Software had with Lightspeed Productions. We can’t find any more details about who Lightspeed Productions were or what happened to them.
It seems TRF was almost complete in 1996 when Atari cancelled it alongside other upcoming Jaguar projects. We can speculate that its assets (such as the digitized actors) were kept by Lightspeed Productions to develop Chi Yong for Playstation. While the two games used the same characters, Chi Yong was expanded to become a 4 players fighting game, a nice addition for a Mortal Kombat clone.
If you know someone who worked at Lightspeed Productions, please let us know!
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