New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

RS Links: the unseen Syndicate prototypes

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!

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

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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O.S.S. [PC? – Concept]

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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Kameo 2 [Xbox 360 – Cancelled]

Kameo 2“, successor of Kameo: Elements of Power, is a cancelled Xbox 360 title which was in development at British studio Rare Ltd. Although it was never officially announced, some Kameo 2 animations appeared in a reel of a former Rare employee, as noticed by some Kameo-fans at the neoGaf Forum. It’s interesting to see that the style of the project looked different from the original game, with a more “realistic” version of the character.  We can speculate that they tried to make Kameo more “mature” to appeal more to the typical Xbox userbase. It is unknown to what extent development was finished when the title was cancelled in late 2007 – around two years after the original was released.

In 2008, concepts for a more direct sequel were created. Kameo mainly retained her design from the same game, just with a more realistic style. Images can be found beneath.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

Kameo2

Character design of Kameo in 2008:

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