New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Others, PC / MAC

SWAT: Urban Justice [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
13-09-2010
1 Comment

SWAT: Urban Justice is a cancelled strategy FPS that would have been the 4th title in the SWAT series of real-time tactical games. Urban Justice was in development by Sierra in 2001 / 2002, but something went wrong, the game was postponed and soon vanished without an explanation. In 2004 Vivendi Universal / Sierra announced a new SWAT project, the official SWAT 4 developed by Irrational Games and published in 2005. As we can read on Gamespot:

According to a carefully parsed statement from a VU spokesperson, work on Urban Justice has been “discontinued” in favor of SWAT 4’s development. However, the same spokesman stressed that SWAT 4 is both a different game and a true sequel, so it will retain the series’ gameplay elements, albeit in a refined form.

In the released SWAT 4, they did leave an ester egg that refers to the unreleased Urban Justice (Info from IMDB):

In the mission “Victory Imports Auto Garage”, there is an arcade game in the waiting room called “SWAT: Urban Justice”. This is a company in-joke; Urban Justice was supposed to be Sierra/Vivendi’s follow up to SWAT 3: Close Quarter Battle (1999), and they began advertising the game as “Coming Soon” in 2002 with a view to releasing later in the year. However, after a spending long time (to the order of years) in development purgatory, Urban Justice was cancelled by Vivendi

Thanks to discworld for the contribution!

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Game Boy (+ Color), Nintendo

War Monster RTS [GBC – Cancelled]

monokoma
12-09-2010
1 Comment

War Monster is a cancelled Real Time Strategy game that was in development by Wicked Witch Software for the GameBoy Color. The game allowed to feature over 120 units on screen at once with large maps for mining of resources (including trees) and building of towns, complete with town centers, barracks and towers. War Monster played amazingly well for a RTS on the GBC, but sadly the project had to be cancelled because they never found a publisher. A playable prototye of this game was later found on Ebay by UncleBob.

The War Monster IP was later reused to create another RTS released for Cellphones and also a tech demo for the DS (that probably will never be used for a full game).

Thanks to Rodent for the contribution!

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Others, PC / MAC

StarCraft 2 [PC – Beta]

monokoma
11-09-2010
1 Comment

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is a RTS developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released on July 2010 for PC and MAC. As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was announced on May 2007 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, but the development began in 2003, shortly after Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was released. According to Rob Pardo and Chris Sigaty, development for StarCraft II was put on hold for a year in 2005 due to the assistance needed for World of Warcraft. On February 2010, StarCraft 2 began closed beta testing, that was expected to last for 3–5 months.

Thanks to the beta, players were able to experience various changes during the development of the game, as posted by ABetaname and Zero7 in our U64 Forum.

Stuff from earlier builds such as cut units were found as leftovers in the beta.

soul hunters aren’t in now

phase cannons aren’t in now

tempests were changed back to carriers

no twilight archons, I believe anyway, I think they’re still normal archons though there is a twilight academy so maybe it’s an evolution/transformation

There has been a lot of other changes over the years that we can find from the Alpha version of the game. Such as the Thor.

“The Thor also originally required an SCV to construct, as opposed to being internally built from a structure. The idea behind this is the Thor was too large to be created from a Factory.”  It also had a different (obviously place holder) voice actor. Basically over the years the Thor kept getting smaller and smaller.

It seems that Blizzard planned on having the Corsair from Starcraft Broodwar in StarCraft 2. However only the voice clips exist of him, hidden in the game’s code.

Various beta voice clips of some units were on the old StarCraft 2 website can be listened below, thanks to Starcraft2units‘ Youtube Channel.

More videos that explain some interesting beta changes can be found in PsyStarcraft‘s Youtube Channel:

32X / Mega CD, Sega

The 4th Unit: Merry Go Round [Sega Mega CD – Cancelled]

monokoma
11-09-2010
1 Comment

The 4th Unit is a series of “point and click” graphic adventures published by Data West in Japan for CD-Rom PCs and Fujitsu FM-TOWNS. It seems that athe sixth chapter called “Merry Go Raund” was also planned for the Sega Mega CD, but it was never released for some reasons. Thanks to Myfishbone we were able to save a promo page about the cancelled Mega CD version, a translation of the main plot and a list of the developers!

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