Runebrid is an unreleased SRPG that was in development in 2003 / 2004 by Max Entertainment for the original XBOX. It would have been published by Takuyo, but only a single piece of artwork was ever shown for the project before its cancellation. Max Entertainment was a new company by Kenji Orimo, former Climax developer and co-director of the original Shining Force. Runebrid might have had gameplay similar to SF (and Orimo’s Super Famicom game FEDA: The Emblem of Justice), but sadly we’ll never know for sure.
Shattered Nations is a cancelled sci-fi action / RTS game that was in development by Blizzard Entertainment. There is not much info on this lost project besides a teaser trailer in which we see a futuristic city and a flying helicopter. From the video description we can read that:
The game was set in a world which was at peace but one day fire rained down from the sky, in which people were forced to scavenge for food and technology. There was a 20 year nuclear winter which made the world into a vast wasteland. The player would have to search for technology and move your people around so that the civilization will thrive.
Rumors say that Shattered Nations evolved into Starcraft. In some issues of PC Champ (a Korean magazine from late 1995 to early 1996) derboo found a render image that shows one mech from Shattered Nations, but in a following issue, that same mech was described as the Goliath from Starcraft (The Goliath in the final game looks way different, though).
The original Starcraft was released in 1998, so it’s possible that in 3 years Blizzard decided to completely change Shattered Nations’ settings and story to create their popular RTS. It’s also possible that some of the Shattered Nations’ assets could have been reused in Starcraft. Sadly we don’t have any confirmation of this theory and even Blizzard refers to Shattered Nations as one of their cancelled games.
Big Guns (Exodus) is a cancelled shooter / action game that was in development by Neversoft Entertainment in 1996 / 1997. They were able to create a good-looking playable tech demo for this project that was shown to Shiny Entertainment on June 1996 to demonstrate their 3D engine in hopes that Shiny would hire them to develop the MDK Playstation port.
As we can read at the Playstation Museum, a coop mode was also available:
Exodus features a fast and furious two player cooperative play. Two player mode does not suffer from any slowdown as a result of the superior 3D engine. What makes Exodus stand out is that both players can combine their mechs into one larger mech. In transformation mode, player one would control the bottom half of the mech including walking and firing at enemies while player two would control the upper half which allows for 360 degree swivel as well as firing upon enemies.
Shiny was impressed with their technology and Neversoft started to work on the MDK conversion (that used the Big Guns engine), while the Big Guns concept was sold to Sony Computer Entertainment America.
Big Gus was meant to be published by SCEA in 1998, but 1997 was a tumultuous year for Neversoft. The MDK conversion took far longer than expected, and Big Guns, renamed Exodus, went through numerous design changes at the behest of Sony. Somehow Exodus was changed from a mech shooter to an action adventure featuring a cat-girl (sadly, we don’t have any image from this version of the game). The project was doomed and it was eventually cancelled in November 1997.
Neversoft shrunk to just twelve employees. The company then spent the next few months shopping around their technology, meeting with numerous companies and looking for work.
In January 1998, just as Neversoft was about to run out of money, they had a fortunate meeting with Activision who were looking for someone to re-develop Apocalypse, a failed internal project featuring the voice of Bruce Willis. The technology developed for Big Guns turned out to be ideal for the project, Activision wase impressed and Neversoft began work on Apocalypse.
In the end Big Guns / Exodus was never released, but at least its 3D engine was used for 2 other games: MDK and Apocalypse.
Star Fox (Starwing in Europe) is a on-rail shooter developed by Argonaut Software and Nintendo EAD, published in 1993 for the Super Nintendo. Argonaut worked closely with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES. They developed a Star Fox prototype on the NES, initially codenamed “NesGlider”, which was inspired by their earlier 8-bit game Starglider, and then ported this prototype to the SNES.
Programmer Jez San told Nintendo that this was as good as it could get unless they were allowed to design custom hardware to make the SNES better at 3D. Nintendo assented to this, and San hired chip designers to make the Super FX chip, the first 3D graphics accelerator in a consumer product. [Info from Wikipedia]
Megalol found some Star Fox beta screens in Nintendo Power magazine from Jan 1993, in which we can notice a completely different (and awesome) beta title screen!
Beta Title:
Final Title:
Originally a sequel titled Star Fox 2 was in the works for the Super Nintendo, but it was never released, though a handful of ROM dumps at various stages of its development were leaked onto the internet.
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