Monster City Naga (魔獣都市ナーガ – Maju Toshi Naga) is a cancelled JRPG that was in development by Compile and it would have been published by Irem for Nintendo Famicom (NES). It was quite an ambitious project for its time: it would feature an internal clock to track real-life hours (similar to Animal Crossing), so NPCs could move and act according to the time of day.
Japanese websites seem to indicate the game was completed, but never released for unknown reasons. In november 2020 some screenshots were found and shared on Twitter (thanks to Heimao!). By looking at these images the main protagonist looks a bit like the one from the manga “Bio Booster Armor Guyver”, but as far as we know they are unrelated.
Apart from its interesting real-time mechanic, gameplay seen in these images seem on par with classic 8-Bit JRPGs: world and city exploration, talking to NPCs and turn-based battles against monsters.
If you find more images or details about Monster City Naga in old gaming magazines, please let us know!
The original Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (2001) turned out to be a very successful game, therefore the announcement of the sequel for PC in March 2004 did not surprise anyone. Ghost Recon 2 showcased better graphics thanks to a new 3D engine, featuring a fun single-player experience and polished multiplayer. At the same time, it was announced that Ghost Recon 3 would have been released in early 2006. Sometime later, Red Storm announced even more details: Ghost Recon 2 would also be released on PS2 and Xbox. The engine and storyline in all three versions would be different and the release date has been pushed back to the first half of 2005. Unfortunately the release for the PC version was again pushed back, and in April 2005 Ubisoft canceled it altogether, explaining that they would just release Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter instead.
In 1989Rare and LJN released A Nightmare on Elm Street tie-in video game on the NES, but it was quite different from what it was originally announced. The main difference in this prototype / concept version of A Nightmare on Elm Street is that you could play as the iconic 80’s slasher icon. Screenshots of the game appeared in a few issues of Nintendo Power and other magazines, sharing some details on the gameplay:
“It’s your greatest dream and your worst nightmare. You are Freddy Krueger… the gruesome star of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies. Use all of your evil powers and special abilities to track down and destroy your pursuers before they bury your bones.” – Nintendo Power.
“You are Freddy Krueger. A horde of obnoxious teenagers are trying to get rid of you by finding your bones and burning them. Killing them is the only way to stop them. You can travel along elm street through various lines (electrical and plumbing) or by stepping into a mirror and entering another room. The kids have weapons and some of them possess “Dream Alter Egos”.. If you strike them before they wake up, they’ll trouble you no more. Sharpen up those finger razors and get ready to slash, ’cause Freddy’s here!”
In one of these screenshots you can see the dream killer as a snake and in another Freddy is normal but going after some random kids, not a character from the film. In 1989, another issue of Nintendo Power addressed the game in an article about the Nintendo Satellite. This one had two different screenshots, one where Freddy is seen with two enemies and a cool title card. The description was different and it described what we got in the final game:
“You may never go to sleep again once you enter the nightmare world. You and your crew, the elm street neighborhood gang, have the power of the satellite to get you through in this LJN horror PAK.”
In 2008 a former developer shared some details about this canned project on CG Society:
“So… this image is 5 years old, low poly realtime model created for a project that could have been. No photos were used in the creation of the textures and the render was not retouched.
This was done at Collective Studios, now known as Double Helix, sometime after Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb shipped. Hoping to work on another game, we did some R & D for a possible sequel. New, polished character models were created and the Indiana Jones model completely redone.
There was an amazing prototype that was up and running with updated gameplay, but unfortunately this project never happened. Probably could have been the greatest Indy game ever. Unfortunately due to things out of the hands of the studio and surprisingly, even the publisher, nothing came about.”
“Six or seven years back, I won’t say who I was working for, but we were working on an Indiana Jones trilogy game based on the first three movies,” says Rex Dickson, lead single-player level designer at Kaos Studios (Homefront). “That game ended up not coming out for whatever reason — I can go on a long diatribe about why — but it was just really cool, because we had the full Hovitos temple built out with the rolling boulder, and it was all awesome. That would’ve been Xbox/PS2 — that generation.”
If you know someone who worked on this lost game and could help preserve even more screenshots or footage, please let us know!
BackSpace is a cancelled sci-fi RPG that was in early development by Obsidian Entertainment from January to April 2011 (around the same time they were finishing Dungeon Siege III), to be published by Bethesda on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The project was pitched as “Sci-Fi SKYRIM with Time Travels” and it was led by Jason Fader (who also worked on Obsidian’s cancelled Aliens RPG, Fallout: New Vegas, and the System Shock remake at Nightdive Studios).
While the game was quickly canned by the studio and it was never officially announced, Kotaku published a short article on the game in 2013, showing off remaining concept art created by Obsidian and sharing a few details on its gameplay:
“BackSpace is a single-player action-RPG set in a scifi space environment with simple elements of time travel. The combat is paced similarly to Skyrim, but slightly faster since there is no concept of blocking. The easiest way to look at it is a mix of Mass Effect, Borderlands, and System Shock 2 for gameplay and setting.”
“It was to be developed in some sort of partnership with Bethesda, I’ve heard, and it’d use the same engine as their ridiculously-successful role-playing game Skyrim. Although BackSpace wasn’t an open-world game, players would be able to travel between a number of planets as well as one large space station.”
“This station is huge,” a BackSpace design document reads. “It can be compared in size to The Citadel of Mass Effect [or] Babylon 5. The station has several locations devoted to diverse research fields which would allow us to have vegetation overgrowth, high-tech disasters, and mutations of science as visual themes.”
“[…] a technical error would fling your character ten years into the future, and you’d spend a bulk of the game hopping back and forth between the time of the attack and a dismal, alien-occupied future. Quests in the game would task you with hopping between timelines in an attempt to save humankind.”
“I was working closely with Bethesda on BackSpace. Since there were no other projects lined up after the Old World Blues team finished their work, I took it upon myself to try to find another project for the company. I reached out to Bethesda and directly asked them what type of game they’d be most interested in publishing next. From there, I started working on a pitch based on a prior game I made, ThreadSpace: Hyperbol (story only, not gameplay). The gameplay was something designed around Bethesda’s interests at the time. No other publishers were pitched on it, to my knowledge, but there was interest from a 3rd party in creating a TV show based on it.
I actually started working on the project a bit before that by myself after hours. Probably as early as October (2010). It was an “after school project” for a very long time, and after a few months, more and more folks would join me after hours to volunteer their time to help. I don’t think we actually worked on it by day until the final month for the prototype. Then the layoffs happened. Then I stuck around for a few more years. Then the big layoffs (including me this time).”
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