New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

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 :)

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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.

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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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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Legions of Fear (La Toile du Diable) [Cancelled – PS2, PC]

yota
28-12-2015
3 Comments

La Toile du Diable (“Devil Canvas” in english) was a PC tech demo created by Delphine Software (DSI) in 2002 in order to show to publishers the technical and gameplay features of a planned PC / PS2 adventure game called Legions of Fear. According to ex-delphine employee Paul Cuisset, Sony was interested in the project, but they wanted Delphine to finish Moto Racer Traffic first (which, ironically, got cancelled too). Unfortunately, Delphine was already going bankrupt at the time, and consequently Legions of Fear was quietly dropped shortly after.

The game was supposed to be set during the first World War, with the main characters being a sister (Helena) and her brother. The story began when the heroine got lost and entered the mysterious Wildcastle Manor. Inside the mansion she discovered that the deceased Anton Wildcastle had apparently promised Helena’s soul to his “masters”.

As seen from the videos below, Legions of Fear was a mix between a survival horror and a point & click adventure: during the action sequences we directly controlled the protagonist and fought enemies in pre-rendered backgrounds. When indoors in order to find clues it was necessary to interact with the environments by using a mouse or – in in case of the Ps2 version – the controller buttons.

Thanks to Thierry Levastre, La Toile du Diable’s lead animator, for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

TR2N: Liberation [Cancelled Pitch – PS3, Xbox 360, PC]

Liam Robertson
21-12-2015
1 Comment

VIDEO:

Tron: Evolution by Propaganda Games was the official tie-in game for the Tron: Legacy movie, but before Disney published this one for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2008 they asked to different studios to pitch a game for their TRON sequel. The film was still internally known with the WIP-title of TR2N and one of these prototypes was made by Day 1 Studios, a team mostly known for the MechAssault series. In the short pitch demos created by D1S in just a few weeks it was possible to play similar scenes to the ones seen in the first official Tron: Legacy trailer from Sandiego Comic Con 2008: a multiplayer racing track and a single player Identity Disc combat sequence (which had 2 playable versions, one of which was built around a rhythm mechanic). Unfortunately Disney wanted to have a fully complete game in less than a year, to be sure to release it as soon as the movie was out. In the end they greenlight the pitch by Propaganda Games and the TR2N prototype by Day 1 Studios was not developed further.

 

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

State of Crisis [Cancelled / Prototype – PS3, Xbox 360, PC]

monokoma
14-12-2015
No Comments

State of Crisis is a cancelled real time strategy first person shooter that was in development in 2010 / 2011 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC by french studio Darkworks. After Ubisoft took away I Am Alive from Darkworks in 2008 to make it finish to Ubisoft Shanghai, the team tried to create many different prototypes to pitch to publishers, to get another contract to survive. We can assume that at the time Darkworks tough that shooters were the most marketable genre to be greenlighted by publishers, so they conceived a few ones (State of Crisis, Black Dead, The Deep) with interesting / original features.

In State of Crisis players would have been able to switch to different teammates in real time, to use a satellite to get strategical information about the enemies and the area, to interact with electronic devices and to requests laser attacks from above. For example we could have been able to study the map of the building in which we would have entered to, checking if there were lights to deactivate to hide in the darkness, to mark enemies and see their position on the map, to place beacon to track an helicopter and destroying it with a powerful laser shoot from the satellite.

To use ammos, the satellite and to hack devices would have cost a certain sum of money from a limited budget for the mission and at the end of each level one could have seen how much the team spent to save the place from terrorists. As far as we can gain from the prototype demo, State of Crisis could have been divided in many different missions to complete as fast as possible and by spending as less money as possible, to gain an higher final score or to save funds to buy better equipment.

Unfortunately Darkworks were not able to find any publisher to fund State of Crisis and the game was quietly cancelled. In 2012 the company was placed into compulsory liquidation and then closed down. In about 15 years of activity, Darkworks were able to successfully complete and release only 2 games (Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare in 2001 and Cold Fear in 2005), while all their other projects were either cancelled or moved to other developers: a sad ending for one of the most interesting gaming studios in Europe.

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Unseen News

The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2

yota
13-12-2015
No Comments

review untold history japanese game developers volume 2The first volume of the untold history of Japanese game developers, released about one year ago, was basically unique: a large collection of interviews that finally documented some of the most obscure aspects of the history of Japanese games, from the humble beginnings on the first personal computers to the more recent doujin titles.

Now that the second volume is finally out, we can safely claim that the author had made a worthy follow up of the original, both in regards of the content and, especially, of the editing: the original conversations were re-translated by a professional, with the result that the flow of the interviews feels now more natural.

The first article of the book is a collective discussion, taken in a japanese game bar called Area 51, with some game developers that preferred to remain anonymous. It’s without a doubt the most controversial section of this work, because the interviewees sincerely talk about the dark role of the Yakuza in the early japanese videogames industry.

Another fascinating chapter of this second volume is dedicated to Zainsoft, a little software house that in the 80s created sidescrollers with dark atmospheres and eccentric stories such as DIOS for PC-88. The president of the company, Takahiro Miyamoto, was a really odd character: obsessed by money, he was later arrested for fraud and disappeared forever.

But the largest part of the book is rightly devoted to Human Entertainment, which not only made revolutionary titles  like Clock Tower and Mizzurna Falls, but also pioneered game development teaching with their Human Creative School; for example, highly original productions such as SOS and The Fireman for SNES actually started as graduation projects.

The author was also been able to interview a few women that were / are in the japanese videogames industry, and while almost everyone of them answered that it wasn’t particularly hard to work in gaming studios,  Rica Matsumura, veteran programmer and Agatsuma‘s general manager,  talks rather honestly about the discrimination she suffered not just in japanese companies but also in America.

Other important highlights of this Volume 2 include: extensive discussions with Masaya (mainly known in the west for Cybernator) former employers;  an in-depth look to Hudson games and their virtually unknown, yet just as innovative, hardware;  an interview with the man behind the seminal Hydlide saga. Oh, and don’t forget the full transcript of our interview with Yukiharu Sambe, R&D manager of the unreleased Taito WOWOW.

Moreover, Mr. Szczepaniak is an huge fan of beta and unreleased titles. These are just some of the cancelled games discussed in the book:

  • An hi-res 2d remake of Golden Axe done in a similar style to Vanillaware titles for Ps3 / Xbox 360.
  • An unnamed Space Harrier clone for Virtual Boy made by Hudson.
  • Notorious, a shooter developed by Gearbox where some american marines somehow ended up in 16th or 17th century Japan. It was supposed to be published by Square-enix.
  • Satellite Man, a SNES side-scrolling beat-’em-up created by t&e soft.
  • Geo Catastrophe, a SNES isometric RPG with an ecology theme. It was in development at Hudson in the middle of the 1990s.
  • Tiger house, a third person shooter made by Tri-Ace, cancelled due to its low quality by publisher Square-enix.
  • An unreleased PS1 RTS co-funded by Nintendo, via the Marigul company.

If you love reading about obscure, curious and strange stories from old-school Japanese gaming studios, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2 is a must-have book (especially as a Christmas present!), that shows how it’s still possible for western journalists to preserve information on the history of japanese videogames, before it could be forgot forever.

You can buy “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2” from

Video review from Youtube by StopDrop&Retro: