News on Cancelled Video Games & Lost Media

The original Silent Scope was developed by Konami for arcades in 1999, with multiple console ports for Dreamcast, PS2 and Xbox. The game was an on-rail shooter in which to use a sniper rifle to hunt down terrorists, rewarding players with higher score for precise kills and making it more slow-paced than traditional light gun shooters. The game was quite popular and Konami soon developed two sequels, with “Silent Scope 2: Dark Silhouette” released in 2000 and “Silent Scope EX” in 2001.

Most people don’t know that in 2011 Konami wanted to create a reboot of the Silent Scope franchise and asked to Day 1 Studios (the team that had recently worked on F.E.A.R. 3, now known as Wargaming Chicago-Baltimore) to work on a Silent Scope third person shooter for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The idea was to make this new Silent Scope a stealth based game, as a more arcadey Metal Gear Solid: set in the near-future, this reboot would also have had sci-fi elements as the main enemy that could move so fast that he appears to teleport around.

Day 1 Studios were able to create an early prototype, with a playable demo in a shopping mall to test how the game would have been played, but in december 2011 Konami decided to cancel the project and the studio had to laid off 95% of the team. This was the end for the Silent Scope reboot.

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Others, PC / MAC

NEXUS 2 / WARP [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

21-03-2016

1 Comment

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident was a sci-fi RTS game developed by Hungarian-based Mithis Entertainment, published by HD Interactive on PC in 2004 (you can still buy it with the latest updates on Steam). While the game did not sell well at the time, it still gathered a cult following of fans, thanks to its different approach to strategy space battles. Soon after releasing Nexus, Mithis started the development of a sequel, but due to the descending market of strategy titles, it was conceived as an action oriented space combat game, with the ability of traveling in a vast galaxy from planet to planet. Seeing the differences from the original Nexus, HD Interactive decided that it would have been better to use a different name and the team reused the title of one of the test prototypes from their first game: WARP. The old W.A.R.P. prototype was a failed proposal for a fighter-pilot based version of the original Nexus, designed when the project was in development limbo and they tought to change its gameplay. In 2005 Mithis developed an early demo for Nexus 2 / WARP, but unfortunately the original Nexus was not selling enough and the market seemed to be too small not only for space-strategy games but for space games in general. So eventually HD decided not to risk it further and they cancelled the Nexus 2 / WARP reboot project. This was the end of the original Nexus saga by Mithis.

On August 2011 Most Wanted Entertainment (a team founded by former Mithis developers) tried to pitch another, different sequel to Nexus on the crowdfunding website GamesPlant, but without luck. In september 2012 they tried again with a campaign on Kickstarter, under the title of “Nexus 2: The Gods Awaken”, failing again to reach their goal. Everything seemed lost, but in September 2015 Nordic Games acquired the intellectual property of Nexus so we can speculate that they could resurrect this series in the future, as it already happened with the lost chapter in the Aquanox series.

Super thanks to Nordic Games for the contribution!

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Others, PC / MAC

Frontier (Origin Systems) [PC – Cancelled Pitch]

LazyFace

14-03-2016

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Frontier is a lost PC game pitched by Warren Spector to Origin Systems with a planned to ship date of Q2 ’94, and was described as a system simulation of the taming of the old west. The high concept of this game was that the player would be a pioneer and they would have to explore and settle a new nation. The player would have to choose what route they would take, the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, what time of the year they would travel, how many settlers would travel with them and where they would eventually stop.

Once the player had decided where to settle they would then choose what they would like their settlers to specialize in like farming, mining or becoming a rancher. The player would then have numerous natural disasters they would have to deal with like earthquakes and floods, natural predators, “Indians” (Native Americans), and what is described as “bad men”. There would also be NPC players that would be direct competition to the player.

The players initial goal was to attract new settlers to their settlement so that they can start a community and make a prosperous new town, this would lead to trains stopping at the town, mail routes, and banks. Ultimately the goal was to attract the county seat and then the state capital so that your settlement could request to become a state, but the player could decide how they would get there, striving to keep their settlers happy or becoming a rich tycoon.

Interestingly this game was pitched as more of an educational game that was akin Civilization, Sim City and Railroad Tycoon, they were looking to attract the audience of these games but were also looking at it being utilized in schools. This would have been Origin’s first simulation, and as far as I can see this game went no further than this pitch document.

Many thanks to Joe Martin for the document.

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

OneChanbara Reboot (Darkworks) [Cancelled Pitch – PS3, Xbox 360]

monokoma

08-03-2016

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Darkworks was an independent French studio not widely known by the average gamer, but they released a couple of fan favorite games as Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (Playstation, Dreamcast and PC) and Cold Fear (PS2, PC and Xbox). The company was founded in 1998 and unfortunately was closed down in 2012, because of economic issues and difficulties in founding new publishers for their titles. In about 15 years of activity, Darkworks were able to successfully complete and release only 2 games, while all their other projects were either cancelled or moved to different developers. There are already a good number of interesting lost Darkworks games in the Unseen64 archive, but many more still remain unseen and even if we tried multiple times to get in contact with people that worked at the studio, it seems almost impossible to know more about what happened to them or to their cancelled games.

Between all those unfinished projects once in development at Darkworks, there was what it looks like a reboot of the OneChanbara series originally created by Tamsoft, the games in which to play as a girl in bikini and cowboy hat, slashing down enemies with double katanas. In the images archived below, you can see that they created a concept art for a western version of Aya (the “clothes” are identical to the original character), one of the main protagonist of OneChanbara. We can speculate that Darkworks tried to pitch to D3 Publisher a new OneChanbara game for PS3 and Xbox 360, during the same time in which D3 also tested a western version of their popular Earth Defense Force series by letting Vicious Cycle Software to develop EDF: Insect Armageddon. Unfortunately for Darkworks, this project was not greenlighted and we’ll never know how good a French OneChanbara could have been. Only a few concept arts remain, to preserve the existence of this lost pitch.

Thanks to Dorwaks for the contribution!

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

P.I.G. (Team 17) [Playstation, PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

29-02-2016

2 Comments

P.I.G. is an interesting 3D platform adventure game that was in development by Team 17 for Playstation and PC, with a planned release in spring 1999. The project was started around 1996, following Mario 64 and the 3D platform craze of the late ‘90, but even with some great premises PIG was cancelled after more than 2 years of development. The only proof of existence of this game seems to be its announcement in an old Team 17 special in Total Control magazine issue 1 (November 1998), where the studio shown many of the projects they were working on, along with Phoenix, Stunt Gran Prix, Project WM and Worms Armageddon.

P.I.G.’s gameplay would have followed similar style of popular games in the same genre as Banjo Kazooie, with the main character being a pig named George, working as a private investigator (this explain the title’s acronym: Private Investigator George) hired to solve the mysterious disappearance of a bunch of piglets, kidnapped by the evil Dr. Gotem in the strange and puzzle filled Fun Dazzle Magic Land theme park.

8 main themed areas (as Mars, the Arctic, Fairy Tales, a Volcano, etc.) were planned and each theme was subdivided into 3 or 4 sub-levels, filled with areas to explore, traps and puzzles, giving a total of around 40 different environments to play in. Lots of different minigames were also available to players, as arcade machines featuring PIG-style versions of some classic games and surreal sections where George was swallowed by a giant pumpkin lantern or shrunk to minute size. George would have used different outfits for each area climate, for example by wearing a sweater and wool hat in the snow level, and more than 60 NPCs (between enemies to fight and friends to help) would have moved around the world.

While this kind of gameplay could not be the most interesting one by today’s standard, back in the day when 3D platform-adventures were some of the most loved games, PIG could really have been a hit. After its reveal in Total Control Magazine, the project seems to have been vanished forever and there are no more info available on its features or why it was cancelled. In an interview by MCV with Team 17 Co-Founder & CEO Debbie Bestwick, she remember how in late ‘90 the huge success of Worms made them to lose sight of how to develop other great games, and they lost a lot of money on a series of unreleased projects:

“For around ten of the past 25 years, all of them ironically post-Worms launching, we came so close to losing the business numerous times due to game slippage, less than smart business decisions and publisher traumas. Worms changed everything about the company in 1995. Prior to that we were doing some very cool stuff – similar to what we are doing right now actually – with amazing games talent from around the world and I often wonder what else we would have done had Worms not landed. We should have stayed true to what we had been doing, but overnight nothing mattered but Worms. We really thought we were superstars and everything we touched would turn to gold, but the reality was that a lot of money was wasted on games that were never released. These included Rollcage, Allegiance, Witchwood, P.I.G, and so many more I won’t mention. I’d say, looking back now, that the Worms IP was as much a Godsend as a poison chalice.”

Thanks to Ross Sillifant for the contribution! If you know someone that worked on this game and could help to preserve more screens or videos, please let us know!

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