New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Unseen News

The development of Grand Theft Auto 3D

monokoma
28-05-2008
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Some time ago, IGN made an interesting article about the history of Grand Theft Auto and in one of the chapters, there are some informations about the development of the first 3D version of the game: “Bringing GTA into the present tense hit its first roadblock when the DMA crew pulled Body Harvest’s 3D code off the shelf and found it’d aged badly. Building a whole new engine from scratch didn’t fit the schedule. Renting one did.”

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“Instead of licensing a proprietary game engine, they became one of the first developers to use generic third-party middleware. Renderware scaled fast. A basic Liberty City was up by summer 2000, and a nameless anti-hero – only referred to as “Claude” in a few obscure lines of code – could boost cars and drive around in it. New elements popped in every month. Weather changed. Day and night marked the time. Some jacked drivers fought back. Stealing the right car opened up bonus missions. Multiplayer got a carry-over from London 1961 and was dropped before the design strayed.”

[…]

“Aircraft-based missions, a GTA first, were curtailed. School kids and elderly pedestrians pushing walkers vanished off the sidewalks. Missions doled out by homeless anarchist Darkel got the chop; only his ice cream truck-bomb job survived, transferred to El Burro with the targets switched from cops to rival gangsters.”

You can read the full story in here. For more screens from the beta version of GTA3, check our archive: GTA 3 Beta / Tech Demo

Thanks to Alber Gallegos for this link!

Others, PC / MAC

Blizzard Cancelled Games

U64 Staff & Contributors
27-05-2008
1 Comment

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At DICE 2008, Blizzard had some talk about their games and in there, they showed an interesting list with a couple of “new” artworks for some of their cancelled projects. As Kotaku has wrote about:

“The team also revealed a list of the Blizzard games that have been canceled over the course of their 17 years, a list longer than you may think. If you thought Blizzard was only focused on StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo, think again. While they may have a few lesser known titles like Blackthorne and The Lost Vikings on their resumes, they were at one point working on all of the following Read more

Others, PC / MAC

WarCraft Adventures [PC – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors
27-05-2008
4 Comments

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WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was a dark comical point-and-click adventure computer game under development by Blizzard Entertainment that was set in the Warcraft universe, and cancelled before its release. American company Animation Magic was out-sourced due to their experience in classical two-dimensional animation to produce the twenty-two minutes of fully-animated sequences, the game’s artwork, the coding of the engine and the implementation of the sound effects. Blizzard then provided all the designs, the world backgrounds, sound recording and ensured storyline continuity. Four or five months after Blizzard had released Read more

Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Nomen Quest / Aidyn Chronicles [Beta – N64]

U64 Staff & Contributors
27-05-2008
5 Comments

nomenquestlogo.jpg

Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage is a video game developed by H2O Interactive and published by THQ. It is one of the few console RPG released for the Nintendo 64. Due to a combination of the poor reviews and even poorer sales, projects for a sequel were dropped.  The game has developed somewhat of a cult following, leading some groups to try to remake the game for Wii or DS homebrew with improved graphics and more rigorous bug testing. [Info from Wikipedia]

In the gallery below you can see some screenshots from a target render that was created in the early days of the project, when it was still know as “Nomen Quest“. In these images the graphic was much more detailed and definited than the one in the final game. Some other screens are from a later beta version, with a different HUD.

Thanks to Myron Mason, we found out more beta differences in these early screens:

The beta for Aidyn Chronicles is indeed very different from the finished game. I have the game and I can already noticed the major differences. The characters are either wearing different clothing or have different colored versions in the beta version and the compass and solar/lunar indicator are different as well. Some of the monsters looked different like the Minotaur as well as the cities. For example, in image 5 it shows the observatory in Gwernia castle, the first city you basically start in. It stands next to the shops and is black in the beta version, but in the finished version it is inside of the castle.

Also, it appears that in the beta version you could pick who you wanted to represent the party when walking around outside of battle. And you could also make that character carrie a weapon around with them. In the realeased version, only Alaron (the main character) represented the party and no weapons could be carried around.

Update: Lisa wrote to us for some corrections:

Although I do realise Myron Mason is only claiming he has the retail game and has spotted some differences in the beta pictures it should not be there as non of it is true. The only true part is that clothing is different on a very few characters.

If you played the game and you can notice some more interesting changes, please let us know!

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