New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony

Jak & Daxter 4 [PS3 – Cancelled / Concept]

monokoma
16-10-2014
1 Comment

Before to fully work on  The Last of Us, Naughty Dog was planning to create a new, even more grittier Jak and Daxter game for the Playstation 3, but after the concept art team drawn some Jak and Daxter artworks to use in this “reboot” of the series, they thought that they would have more freedom to just create a new IP for the mature audience, and thus the project evolved to became The Last of Us. After Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3, this project could have been the 4° title in the main Jak series (or even the 5th one if you consider Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier). In the end, Naughty Dog never released any new Jak & Daxter game for the PS3, only an HD collection with their first 3 PS2 games.

At the IGDA Toronto 2013 Keynote, Neil Druckmann (Creative Director & Writer from Naughty Dog) talked about this cancelled Jak & Daxter concept:

Our task was to reboot Jak & Daxter. We spent a lot of time exploring the world of Jak and Daxter and how we would reboot it; how we would bring these characters back, some story ideas that we were getting excited about.

As much as we like these concepts and exploring these fantastical worlds, we found the ideas that we were getting passionate about were getting away from Jak & Daxter. We were questioning ourselves, were we doing this for marketing reasons and naming something Jak & Daxter when it really isn’t Jak & Daxter, or were we really passionate about it?

As we can read at GameInformer:

Shelving the Jak and Daxter ideas meant the team could begin work on a fresh idea. Shedding the restrictions of an existing IP allowed directors Druckmann and Straley to let their creative juices flow and explore whatever they wished.

Some concept arts from this cancelled “Jak & Daxter 4” project were shown by Neil Druckmann at the IGDA Toronto, in the “A Tribute to Naughty Dog: 30th Anniversary” exhibition in september / october 2014 and in the “Naughty Dog’s 30th Anniversary” art book (you can buy it on Amazon UK for 20.39£, Amazon USA for 25$ or Amazon IT for 32 euro), as posted by Junkie Monkeys!

Thanks to Loïc Caria for the contribution!

Images:

Video:

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

Saints Row: The Cooler [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3]

Liam Robertson
13-10-2014
1 Comment

Saints Row: The Cooler is a cancelled fighting game, which was in development for the Xbox 360 and PS3. It was being created by Heavy Iron Studios in Los Angeles and was funded by THQ.

“It was a brawler game. Go to a bar, pick a fight, smash a bottle over someone’s head” – Former Heavy Iron Studios artist

Work began on the title in March 2010 at developer, Heavy Iron. In partnership with THQ, the company sought to create the first Saints Row game controlled entirely by motion; a ploy to capitalise on the rising industry trend at the time.

Two versions of the game were planned initially: an Xbox 360 game using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral and a PS3 port with Playstation Move support. The Xbox 360 was the lead development platform for The Cooler, as the team’s creative focus was very much on Kinect.

A team of around 40 people were put on the project, while the rest of the studio was occupied with another Kinect-centric project for Disney called ‘E-Ticket’.

We were able to get in touch with several people, a mix of both former and current employees at the developer, who shared some details with us on the game’s lifecycle. According to these sources, the title was a brawler set in the Saint’s Row universe and was, in contrast with the rest of the series, not an open world game.

“It was a ton of fun to work on because we got to use the original Saint’s Row locales as concept art, basically, and give them a redesign and a highly upgraded art treatment (since Saint’s Row was open world and our game was not, we could afford to devote more time and engine resources to artwork)”

Saints Row The Cooler

One of the gritty environments of Saints Row: The Cooler

Kinect lap dancing

Despite it ditching the free roaming traditions of the previous games, The Cooler apparently offered a myriad of activities to experience. Its main premise was of motion-controlled fighting in various parts of the Saints Row universe, but players would have also been able to compete in poker tournaments and other miscellaneous mini-games. Read more

Unseen News

Would you support Unseen64 with Patreon for 1$ a month?

U64 Staff & Contributors
08-10-2014
No Comments

Lately Patreon (thanks to Farel for the suggestion!) is becoming more and more used by small, independent gaming websites to rise support and monthly donations to be able to pay the site server and to create better content. Some good examples are HG101 and Tiny Cartridge.

Patreon lets readers support their favorite websites by becoming patrons, giving a small donation every month, automatically through paypal / credit card. Unlike other fundraising services (for example Kickstarter), which raise lots of money for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who publish online a stream of smaller works, like website updates, articles, researches, and need just little money every month. Empowering a new generation of creators, Patreon is bringing patronage back to the 21st century.

The new server that hosts Unseen64 costs about 300$ a year. U64 is an independent site. No money is generated from our work so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves, with the help of a few awesome supporters. Some years ago we had Google Adsense banners that helped a bit to get money to pay the server, but then Google banned us because we write about prototypes and rom-hacks, even if we don’t host those files on our server.

If you want to help Unseen 64 to survive and if you can donate some of your love every month, we would like to try to rise monthly contributions through Patreon. You can just donate how much or little you want, and you can cancel your pledge at any point if you’re low on cash or have a change of heart. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the U64 Archive. Patreon takes 5% and the creators cover the credit card transaction fees which are generally 4%, so we would see around $0.90 of every dollar.

We’d like to open different Milestone Goals, so for example if we are able to get 25 patrons to donate 1$ a month, we can pay the U64 server for another year and write weekly updates, if we are able to rise 100$ a month we could publish an Unseen64 Book with articles and insights about cancelled videogames (something like HCG101’s “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers”, but with more engrish), if we are able to rise 2.000$ a month (LOL), we could pay our best contributors for more good articles and work on Unseen64 24/7 for daily updates on the site, deeper researches on lost videogames, create videos, interviews with forgotten developers, etc.

We also would like to offer special gifts for people that donate more than 1$ a month, for example we could share exclusive / early access videos with people that donate 10$ a month, to send a physical copy of our (potential) U64 book to who donate 25$ a month, to work on dedicated articles and special requests for who donates 50$ a month, and so on.

Before to organize a Patreon account, we’d like to do a poll to see if this idea could be useful to support Unseen 64. What do you think? Would you support U64 trough Patreon with 1$ or more a month? What would like to see as “special gift” and “Milestone Goals”? Give your vote and comment below!

Dreamcast, Others, PC / MAC, Sega

Stormbringer: Elric of Melniboné [Cancelled – PC Dreamcast]

Damiano Bacci
06-10-2014
3 Comments

Stormbringer: Elric of Melniboné is a cancelled Action RPG videogame which was in development on Windows PC and Dreamcast by the Russian team Snowball Interactive, and  it was going to be published by US-based Octagon Entertainment.

Stormbringer was the second attempt in creating a videogame based on the character of Elric of Melniboné, the protagonist of several fantasy stories created by the English writer Michael Moorcock. The first attempt (that was also cancelled) was made by Psygnosis for the Playstation and it was simply titled Elric.

We have many info about this project, from various interviews with Sergei Klimov, Managing Director of Snowball Interactive. Here are some quotes from the interview on IGN RPG Vault Network, you can read the full text on the archived version of IGN RPG Vault, part one and part two. Read more

Microsoft, Xbox 360

Disney’s E-Ticket [Xbox 360 – Prototype]

Liam Robertson
29-09-2014
No Comments

E-Ticket was a prototype pitch for a cancelled interactive tour game developed by Los Angeles-based Heavy Iron Studios Inc., which was commissioned by The Walt Disney Company in 2010. The corporation was looking to create a new game using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 that would allow players to explore a virtual interpretation of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Although a completed version of this concept would later be developed by Frontier Developments and released under the name of ‘Kinect Disneyland Adventures‘ in late 2011, E-Ticket represents an early, alternative iteration of the project that took different creative liberties with the setting.

E ticket 1

According to three former Heavy Iron Studios employees we spoke with, E-Ticket was conceived when Disney funded the development of a number of prototypes for a Disney World Kinect game at several different studios. Each team was assigned to work on a separate section of the Disney World park. The project, as a whole, was both a technical experiment, as well as a test to see which developer would perform best and be rewarded with a contract to work on the full game.

“The original premise was to build a virtual Disneyland that kids could walk through from the comfort of their own living room.“

Read more