New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Project X (Activision) [Xbox 360, PS3 – Cancelled]

Project X is a cancelled third person action game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, which was in development around 2005 / 2007 by Z-Axis studio (later known as Underground Development) for Activision. The game was never officially announced by the company and it’s just one of many more unreleased games (such as Call of Duty: Devil’s Brigade) the team was working on, before Activision decided to close them down in 2010.

Only a few screenshots and a short video remain to remember the existence of this lost game. By looking at these, we can assume the game would have been somehow similar to other action games with super-powers like Prototype and Infamous. The main protagonist was able to morph itself into different forms of elemental energy, for example a body of ice or fire. By switching elements it would have been able to easily kill different kinds of enemies of the opposite element.

It seems only an early prototype was developed before Activision cancelled the project, maybe to switch the team to work on the PS3 version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

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She Queen Death Machine (Psygnosis) [PC – Cancelled]

She Queen Death Machine is a cancelled side-scrolling action game which was in development by Psygnosis in 1995, to be released for PC MS-DOS. No more details remain from this lost game and it was mostly unknown to the public until Grzegorz found a few images hidden in old gaming magazines: Generation 4 (issue 76), Top Secret (issue 37), and Secret Service (May 1995).

In these magazines She Queen Death Machine was described as an exciting action platformer with lots of shooting, punching and explosions. Because of the game’s title and by looking at the characters sprites, it seems the main protagonist was meant to be a female soldier. Other features listed in these short previews were multi-directional screen scrolling, parallax effects, many different weapons to use and bosses at end of levels. One of these levels was described as a military camp with hangars and towers with enemy guards lurking everywhere.

After a few previews in gaming magazines, She Queen Death Machine vanished forever. After Sony acquired Psygnosis in 1993 and released their Playstation in 1995, their resources were switched from PC to the more profitable Playstation market. She Queen Death Machine may be one of the games cancelled because of this.

Thanks to Grzegorz for the contribution!

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Metal Slader Glory 2 [Nintendo 64DD – Cancelled]

The original Metal Slader Glory is a sci-fi visual novel / graphic adventure developed by HAL Laboratory and published in 1991 for the Nintendo Famicom. The game’s plot is similar to many popular mech-anime series, with a group of young boys and girls fighting against their enemies using cool robots.

As we can read on Wikipedia the game soon became a cult-classic and a sought-after collector’s item in the secondhand market due to its quality and its rarity. This may be the reason why Nintendo and HAL initially decided to create a new Metal Slader Glory for their Nintendo 64 DD Add-on.

metal slader glory 2 Nintendo 64 DD Cancelled

As revealed by Metal Slader Glory scenario director & character-designer Yoshimiru (よしみる) in a doujin booklet he published a few years ago and later in a series of tweets, it seems Metal Slader Glory 64 would have been a sequel / prequel, as the main character was planned to be Kisaragi Yayoi, a girl who (as far as we know) is just a secondary NPC in the original Famicom game (plus he also revealed they planned a new character named Uzuki). The team also wanted to use many of the 64DD features, such as its internal clock and rewritable disks.

Unfortunately after a while Metal Slader Glory 2 was cancelled – maybe because Nintendo kept delaying their 64DD – and instead the team developed a simple remake of the first game for the Super Famicom under the title “Metal Slader Glory: Director’s Cut”, later released in 2000 as the last official game ever published for SNES in Japan.

We can only imagine how many more obscure lost cancelled games for N64 are still hidden out there to be discovered one day.

Thanks to VGDensetsu for the contribution!

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Moeyo Butaman [NES – Cancelled]

Moeyo Butaman (燃えよ ぶたマン!?) is a cancelled NES / Famicom game that was in development in 1992 and it would have been published by Sigma Enterprises. Only a couple of (tiny) scans from old japanese gaming magazines remain to remember the existence of this game.

The main protagonist was going to be some kind of super-hero pig, and as noted by GDRI gameplay could have been similar to Time Zone, another action platformer published by Sigma in 1991.

Characters designer for Moeyo Butaman was Gen Sato  – a designer / animator who also worked on “Suishou no Dragon” with Squaresoft and on many anime – who seems to have a playable cart of Moeyo Butaman in his personal collection.

We can only hope that one day he could dump the game to preserve it from being lost forever.

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Gotcha! (Relief Ace) [Playstation – Cancelled]

Gotcha! (ガッチャ) is a cancelled Playstation game that was in development by a really obscure Japanese company named “Relief Ace” (リリーフエース), of which we cannot find much information online. Thanks to GDRI we know that Relief Ace published at least two games before vanishing forever, “Shin Fortune Quest: Shokutaku no Kishi-tachi” for Playstation and “Ojousama Express” for Sega Saturn, but none of them looks anything like Gotcha!.

We only know about this lost Playstation game thanks to a video that was uploaded a couple of years ago on Youtube, but later removed (or at least I cannot find it online anymore, so I re-uploaded my backup-copy). From this short promotional teaser it seems Gotcha! could have been some kind of 3D action game in which to find people hiding in the crowd to hit them with a toy hammer.. Or something like that? Yeah, we are not sure.

If you can help to unveil more details about this mysterious game or Relief Ace, please let us know!

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