New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Others, PC / MAC

Rock [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
18-10-2009
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Rock is a space combat sim / mech sim / FPS hybrid that was in development in 1999 / 2000 by Singletrack for PC, but later cancelled because the studio was closed. The team planned to combine 3 genres into a single game, to let the player a lot of freedom in how to resolve the missions. It was an ambitious project, as we can read from a preview published in Computer Gaming World magazine (thanks to Roushimsx on the HG101 Forum):

Imagine a game where you can jump into a tarfighter, dogfight our way to a martian plain, hop out, toss a grenade in a Mech to kill the pilot so you can claim the assault robot for yourself, rampage across a warzone in your new weapons platform and finally jump out and enter a building, killing some fuards before you plat explosives to level it – all of this without any load screens to stall the action.

Cooperative online multiplayer was also planned. After Singletrack closed down, the Rock team ended up moving on to Incognito Entertainment (later purchased by Sony) and started to work on Warhawk for the PS3. You can feel that some of the concepts from Rock were implemented into Warhack.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Unseen News

RS Links: the unseen Syndicate prototypes

monokoma
16-10-2009
2 Comments

syndacateporotos

Robert Seddon has made us to notice an interview that Inc Gamers had with Sean Cooper, creator of Syndicate, a real time strategy / shooter that was released in 1993 for PC and various consoles. The article mentions various prototype Syndicate sequels that were never released, though it doesn’t have much information about them. As we can read:

During his time at EA, Cooper claims he saw a few demo builds of a new Syndicate title and was unimpressed.

“One of [the prototypes] … it was something about using different senses. Something was leaving a scent and the agents were following it. I remember seeing them demo it in a conference room and thinking ‘what are they trying to achieve? what are they doing?'”

We can only wonder if one of those protos could have been the Syndicate game that was in development for the PS2. For now only few artworks of the PS2 version are preserved, but we still did not see any in-game screenshots from it or from the other unseen Syndicate projects.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!

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

Road Rash (2006) [X360/PS3 – Cancelled]

monokoma
16-10-2009
No Comments

A new game in the Road Rash series was in development by EA Warrington in 2006, but the project was soon cancelled and the studio was closed. The game was probably in early development when it was canned and only an animation pre-viz was found to preserve its existance. As Tiffany Steckler of EA explained to GamesIndustry.biz:

The UK  Studio has decided to reinforce its development base by bringing the creative teams from disparate locations into one place. […] The idea is to have those people who are working in the North West Studio in Warrington closer geographically to Guildford and Chertsey, to help build a more cohesive entity, to have better synergy across teams, better career opportunities and better sharing of tools and libraries

It’s still possible that the Road Rash concept created at EA Warrington could be resurrected sometime in the future in the “bigger” EA UK studio.

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Others, PC / MAC

O.S.S. [PC? – Concept]

U64 Staff & Contributors
16-10-2009
2 Comments

In 2000, Pandemic Studios developed a game concept called “OSS”. It was set in World War II and the player was involved in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a United States intelligence agency, as the game’s title reveals.  OSS never entered production at Pandemic Studios for unknown reasons. The platform of the game was probably not decided yet, but we can speculate at least a PC version.

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