New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Leaked, PSP, Sony

Saints Row: Undercover [PSP – Cancelled]

monokoma
25-01-2016
3 Comments

Saints Row: Undercover (also known as Saints Row: The Fall in its early phase) is a cancelled chapter in the popular over-the-top open world series by Volition, planned to be released for Sony’s PSP. This game was meant to be the first entry of Saints Row for portable consoles and while a 3DS version was also announced many years ago (titled Saints Row: Drive-By), neither of them were ever released.

Development on Undercover was originally started by Mass Media Games (that already worked with Volition on the PS3 version of Saints Row 2) and then transferred to Savage Entertainment (the same team that ported Star Wars: Battlefront II and Medal of Honor: Vanguard to the PSP). Initially Volition wanted to simply port Saints Row 2 to the PSP, but after a while the project became a new, original sequel, with its own story and characters.

Saints Row: The Fall  was to be set between Saints Row 1 and 2, but thanks to the success of SR2 they later decided to create a sequel to the second game, to expand its story and making it more interesting for the fans. In Saints Row PSP the city would have been split as a result of a civil war within the Saints. The Third Street Saints, who the player would have joined, possessed only a little area in the middle. We would have took the role of an undercover cop, charged with investigating the civil war within the Saints, and at the end of the game we could have decided to join them and betray the police.

The plan for Undercover was to create something similar to the GTA games for the PSP, keeping the core gameplay of the series, with crazy gameplay, a fun world to explore, character customization and coop multiplayer. The game would have had 20 main story missions to complete, along with the usual SR side activities to earn respect points.

Savage Entertainment developed a short playable prototype, but unfortunately after multiple reviews Volition decided that Undercover just wasn’t meeting the standards of what they thought a Saints Row game should be. The game was cancelled and the PSP dev kit on which the project was created was hidden away in one of Volition’s storage rooms.

Only many years later Saints Row: Undercover was found again thanks to Josh Stinson (Associate Video Editor at Volition), that stumbled upon that PSP dev kit while looking around their office. After talking about it with colleagues and with the support of Alexander Mejia (Video Producer at Volition) and Mike Watson (Community Manager at Volition), they were able to convince their bosses that such a lost games should have been shared with the fans, as an interesting curiosity and a piece of gaming history to preserve. During Volition’s stream on Twitch on the 22January 2016 they officially shown Saints Row: Undercover to the world and this Thursday (Jan 28) they will do a dedicated stream around 4pm CST.

Please join their stream on Twitch the 28th of January to see more from this lost game and to ask every questions you have directly to Volition! This is really important as if this stream will be successful Volition will release even more info on other cancelled games!

Below you can download Saints Row: Undercover walk through, design doc and fully playable prototype, also shared by the lovely people at Volition. Huge props to them!

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Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Switchblade 2 [NES – Cancelled]

yota
19-01-2016
10 Comments

Switchblade 2 is side-scrolling action title originally developed by Core Design and published by Gremlin Interactive for Amiga in 1991. A Famicom / NES port of the game, created by Kemco, was slated for release in november 1992. The player controlled a soldier, nicknamed “Switchblade”,  who had to save planet F-S5 from an alien invasion. As in similar action titles, he was able to double jump, use blades, guns, and collect power-ups for the latter. More weapons and upgrades could also be bought in the store.

It’s unknown why Kemco never released their version of Switchblade 2 or if it had any major difference compared to the original Amiga version, graphics aside.

Sources:

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Others, PC / MAC

10th Planet (Bethesda) [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
12-01-2016
6 Comments

10th Planet was an ambitious space combat simulator in development as a co-venture between Bethesda Softworks (you know, the studio that published The Elder Scrolls series) and Centropolis Production, two names that in the mid / late ’90 meant an high value game and lots of hype. Centropolis is a film production company founded in 1985 by Roland Emmerich, behind such popular movies as Stargate and Independence Day.

Another small company named “XL Translab” was hired to create high quality cinematics for the game’s intro and the story that was handled by the same Hollywood team that produced ID4. Here’s a short teaser from the game’s auto demo:

Somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto, a planet full of aliens is waiting. In a centuries long orbit, this 10th planet is heading toward earth. Only your brilliant strategies and expert piloting can destroy the alien invaders. Based upon the Xngine, which provides a true 3D environment for real time space combat.

10th Planet was in development at least since 1995 and Bethesda acquired XL Translab in December 1997, possibly because they were impressed by the FMV they created for the game. The project was briefly shown in Next Generation magazine on February 1997, were they called it “the coolest space combat sim since TIE Fighter“. Bethesda planned to recreate space battles against large sci-fi armies and huge alien ships, similar to the ones seen in Independence Day, but unfortunately something went wrong and 10th Planet had to be cancelled.

A former Bethesda developer remember that the cinematics created by XL Translab were beautiful for their time, but costed a lot of money and made the real time game on the Xngine to look ugly in comparison :

yeah I remember sitting in the Bethesda theatre and seeing what you produced. It looked great if we were going to produce a new TV show but unfortunately it probably killed the product. How on earth were we ‘the game artists’ supposed to recreate the world you were selling. Too much time and money was wasted on this trailer.

At the moment we don’t know how much of the game was completed before the cancellation, if you worked on this lost project, please let us know!

Thanks to Sam Jones for the contribution!

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Videos:

Game.com, Others

Turok [Game.com – Cancelled]

monokoma
04-01-2016
No Comments

The original Turok was a quite popular N64 FPS in late ‘90 but the series did not have much luck in the last few years and after the 2008 reboot by Propaganda Games, Disney Interactive Studios cancelled a planned Turok sequel. Many years before another Turok game was already cancelled for the ill-faited Game.com portable console by Tiger Electronics. As far as we know Tiger had an internal studios dedicated to develop titles for the Game.com and Turok was probably one of them. This version of the game remains unknown by most gamers as it was only named in a few release lists and most magazines at the time did not have any images. It seems that Tiger often shown mock ups for games that they wanted to make for the console, as it happened with the canned conversions of Metal Gear Solid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, so we don’t know how much of Turok was really in development for their portable before to be abandoned. At the moment the only “screenshot” available for Turok Game.com was found in Gamepro issue 111 from December 1997, but it seems that some footage from was also shown in an old episode of Cybernet TV gaming show.

Thanks to Jinroh for the contribution!

Images:

turok game.com cancelled

Status, Unseen News

We are ready for another year of unseen games, thank you!

U64 Staff & Contributors
03-01-2016
No Comments

While we keep working on the Unseen64 website as much as we can, plus taking extra time to write articles and organize interviews for the Unseen64 book (that we hope to be able to release in mid / late 2016), another year passed. 2015 was an important year for U64 as we were able to remain an independent website by getting enough support from Patreon to fully pay the server for a couple of years and also rise enough donations to create a Preservation Fund to be able to save enough money for future needs.

This means that we can work on the site without having to sell ads space to spammy or useless advertisers that want to buy links or banners from us, we can have resources to be sure that the Unseen64 book will be as good as we want it to be and if there could be some technical problems with the site in the future, we should have enough funds to fix everything! This is why we are really happy :)

fallout-pixel-thumbs-up

As we wrote in the past big gaming networks such as IGN or Kotaku have the resources to own powerful servers and to pay a team to work full-time on their websites, keeping their sites online and publishing daily updates. We don’t have their resources, but we think we have something better: we have you, a community of gamers that know why it’s important to remember beta and cancelled games, even those little, unfinished and bad-looking lost games that no one else would ever care to commemorate. For us, every unseen game should have a chance to be archived.

In 2016 we will keep to add new games to the archive every week, while publishing daily updates in our Twitter account. There are many ways to help Unseen64 and thanks to all the other gamers, youtubers and websites that also work to preserve beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, we can save as many unseen games as possible.

unseen64-patreon-2016

Unseen64 is still online thanks to all those awesome people that shared one-off donations and pledges on Patreon: together, we can do it!

We’d like to thank all of you (in random order) that are helping U64 with your donations and support:

Daan Koopman, joef0x, Louis Noguera, Mark J. Lang, Thomas Whitehead, allan paxton, David Galindo, Frans Aymes, robert Smith, Emiliano Rosales, alejandro muñoz, Kristian Binder, Paul Benson, Faisal AlKubaisi, Aarón Moleón Acosta, Quade Zaban, Julian Lord, Paul Cunningham, Rav, Justin Moor, Daniel Gulyas, Shane Gill, Ash the dragon, Ryan Jessee, Conrad A Fursa, Lukas Steinman, Christopher J Canberg, Chris Rosenthal, Edd Hannay, Reuben M, Shaun Moore, Anders Moberg, Will Richardson, HellaSkella-X, Corentin, Andrew Eleneski, KiddoCabbusses, Nick Greene, Alex MacIntyre, Thomas, Liam Robertson, Henry Branch, Matthew, Coldi, Otto Nordling, Pug Hoof Gaming, Joe Brookes, Austin Murphy, James Jackson, Andrew Crawford, Aaron Sharratt, James Champane, Dan Berends, Jonathan Pena, Eduardo Raposo, Tiago Pereira dos Santos, Jacob Walker, Jonathan Cooper, Paul Stedman, Viraj, Jrg McJrg, Noru-Da T, David Seijas, Toadsanime, Mhee123, Brice Onken, Aaron Morley, Dylan Durmeier, Alex Stutzman, Guilherme Killingsworth, Pablo Bueno Navarro, Paul Robinson, Levi Wyatt, Josh Mann, Brice Dirden, Rhys, Kerry-Lee Copsey, Dan Thomas, Daniel Hannen, Adrian, Ben Cowling, Alex Wawro, Niels Thomassen, netsabes, Lou, Matthew Gyure, PtoPOnline, Jesus Tovar, Jacob, Brandon, Lisa, Akspa, Martin, Elmo Bluegeek, Irvin, Raphael Pinheiro, James Steel, Tony, Alex Kupse, Anders Captain N Iversen, No Reward, Tommy Wimmer, Goffredo and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

 We <3 you

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