New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Batman: The Dark Knight [X360/PS3 – Cancelled]

Batman: The Dark Knight was an open world action stealth video game loosely based on the 2008 film, The Dark Knight. The game was unofficially revealed in the summer of 2007 as being in the works at Pandemic Studios’ Australian branch in Brisbane.

This cancellation makes The Dark Knight the first Batman film made by Warner Bros. not to receive a video game translation.

As we can read on Kotaku (thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!), the development of Dark Knights had too many problems and it was probably the main reason why the studio was closed:

“Pandemic worked out a deal with Warner/DC and EA to make a Batman game. So Pandemic spent six months on pre-production of a Batman game. Then EA came in and said it had to be a Dark Knight game, so most of that six months’ work was thrown out. EA were forced to rush the project, as their ownership of the Batman rights would expire in December 2008. […] Pandemic thought an open-world game would suit the property best. But few, if any staff at Pandemic Brisbane had experience making open-world games. The decision was made to use the same engine being used for Pandemic’s upcoming WWII action title Saboteur. It’s a pretty engine, but was never built for the kind of open-world game Batman was supposed to be, and this caused a ton of serious technical issues.

Some leaked screenshots were found by Superior Version in January 2009.

Thanks to Borman and Dan for the contribution!

Images:

Video:

Soulless [Mac – Beta]

Soulless is a side-scroller action game that was developed by Cobra Blade and released in 2008 for Mac. The original concept of the project was a quick Wizard of Wor style game with Space Marines against zombies, but it later became the side-scroller action game that we can play today. In the beta version the space marine armour was different from the final one.

Thanks to Cobra for the contribution!

Beta (click for bigger version):

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Final (click for bigger version):

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Killer 7 Development & Beta Analysis

Killer 7 is an adventure game developed by Grasshopper Manufacture and published by Capcom for the GameCube and PlayStation 2. It was released in 2005 but it was first announced in 2002 as one of the original “Capcom 5” games. In 3 years of development the game changed a lot from its original concept trailer and when Killer 7 was finally released many  parts of the story were removed.

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Article written by monokoma

[Before reading this article, keep in mind that i’m italian and i’m not used to write so much in english. I’m sorry if there are errors and weird uses of the english language: if you have some corrections to make, you can send me an email and i’m going to fix the article. Thanks for your help!]

The game was written and directed by Goichi Suda, also known as Suda51, a man with his own peculiar way to create a dreaming and symbolic narrative, often associated to film directors like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Many people don’t get his style, but some gamers fell in love with his digital storytelling.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion [X360/PS3/PC – Beta]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an action RPG developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks and the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary 2K Games. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Ace.dark posted an interesting topic in our forum, in which he explain that thanks to the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and the use of the Developers Console (brought up by pressing ~ on your keyboard) it’s possible to find the removed Kvatch area that was shown at E3 2005, still hidden in the final game! It seems that there are even some unused items, areas and enemies that were forgotten in the code.

If you have the PC version of the game you can download this file that adds some of the spells and items not normally available to normal users. In the Imperial City in the market district, there is a shop keep that will sell the beta items in Merchants Inn, he is always there but does not always sell the same items.

Thanks a lot to Ace.dark for the contribution!

Videos:

Part of an interesting demonstration of the beta. This demonstrates the original intentions for Radiant AI. Radiant AI was cut back before release because it was difficult to keep the game world from falling apart.