News on Cancelled Video Games & Lost Media

Future Zone is a cancelled action/adventure platformer game, developed for the Super Nintendo and the Genesis/MegaDrive, from 1993 until 1995, by Visual Concepts and published by Electro Brain.

The game was set in a distant future where players took the role of Jason Baker Kane, a soldier sent in an alien world named future zone, which serves as a prison. The player allied himself with a rebel group, trying to escape this fortress.

The game was briefly mentionned, for the first time, in March 1993 by the issue #46 of Nintendo Power after apparently being shown at the Winter CES. In the same period, GamePro issue #45 said that the game showcased:

(…) an unbelievably huge environment, close to the size of Super Mario World.

It was then planned for the end of the year, also on the Genesis/MegaDrive. Then in August 1993, with the issue #51 from Nintendo Power again, the title has apparently been shown again, this time for the Summer CES. By the time, the project was re-scheduled for a release in mid-1994.

It wasn’t until May 1994 that Future Zone came back in the press. Still with Nintendo Power, issue #60, we learned that, apparently, the project changed in its direction, alongside the developer, without additional details. The Genesis/MegaDrive version was, from this point on, never mentionned again. More was shared in December 1994, with the issue #71 from Video Games Magazine, where we learned that the title was developed by Visual Concepts and was going to feature side-scrolling platform action, first-person 3d mazes and Mode 7 flying levels.

In February 1995, it was the issue #39 of french magazine Joypad which said that Future Zone was scheduled for June 1995, according to them, it was of the same caliber as Super Metroid. The Mexican version of Club Nintendo wrote a short preview, the same month, on the game, showing a screenshot of a Mode 7 level. Here is what we can read:

In a prison in the future, a soldier who should not be there has to escape in order to save a planet, this is the plot of the game Future Zone by Electro Brain; This title has 16 megabytes of memory and is basically developed in two types of game modes: Contra-style action and in a ship that flies over a surface with rotation and scale. This game is still very preliminary, we just hope that they are not going to leave it in mobility as we saw.

Unfortunately, it was the last time that Future Zone was covered in magazines. The game vanished with no trace, and to this day, it is still unclear why it was ultimately cancelled, although, by reading about it on various magazine issues, it looks like the development didn’t always go as planned, with numerous changes. To this day, no ROM leaked onto the internet, but a short trailer is available to remember its existence.

If you know someone who worked on Future Zone and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

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Video:

Others, PC / MAC

Enemy Infestation 2 [PC – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

18-11-2023

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Enemy Infestation 2 is a cancelled futuristic Sci-Fi Strategy game developed around 1998-1999 by Australian company Micro Forté, for the PC. It was the sequel of the strategy game of the same name.

The first game was set in the 24th century, where a group of colonies are attacked by a swarm of aliens who want to preserve their race. Your mission is to save the colonists and stop the aliens from taking over the planet.

Few information are available on this sequel. Fortunately, former art director Delaney King shared on her personal website some details about its background and why it was quickly cancelled:

Stephen Wang and I wrote the story of Enemy Infestation 2. Salis is found in a cryo bed early in the game and released. An alien hybrid, she begins to grow extremely fast- becoming adult sized by the end of the game. One nice touch was the level after Salis is freed from the lab, an unspoken change to the sprites showed one of the marines has given her his jacket. As the game would have gone on, all the sprites would have evolved until all the characters where blooded, sweaty, stripped down and patched up. We had Raelee Hill from Farscape lined up to voice her. (…)

About its cancellation, she explained:

(…) We actually started pre-production on the game, but then Fallout Tactics came along and it was too sweet to miss out on.

If you know someone else who worked on Enemy Infestation 2 and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

Thanks to Delaney King for sharing this!

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

Youngblood: Search and Destroy [PC / PSX – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

21-10-2023

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Youngblood: Search and Destroy is a cancelled action/Role-Playing game published by GT Interactive Software and developed by Realtime Associates around 1997-1998, for the PC and the Playstation. It was based on the comic-book of the same name.

The game featured in various magazines from the Summer of 1997. Electronic Gaming Monthly #97 wrote:

Based on the popular comic book, Youngblood uses the power of the Playstation to give gamers a title that looks similar to Crusader: No Remorse. (…) Control one of the main characters from Youngblood in an isometric view. (…) Pick one character to control or form a group of two to four.

Game Informer #52 told us:

While most would think this title should be strictly action, GT is filling the game with less action and more RPG elements. (…) At times, the game does resemble Project Overkill, but otherwise, you’ll be controlling a party of characters, and the battles will be turn-based.

GT Interactive’s former producer Kurt Busch explained in the issue 31 of Next Generation that they initially planned to make the title a First-Person RPG, before trying a 3rd person action game, somewhat similar to Tomb Raider, and finally taking an approach much more similar to Diablo:

Initially, I felt very strongly we should do this as a first-person RPG (…). But the more we thought about it, the more we realized it would be very difficult to do it because you want to show off the characters, and in first-person we couldn’t work out the right set of views so players could see who was beside them. In the end, it just wasn’t very satisfying. (…) The problem with doing a Tomb Raider-style, third-person game, was that the main attraction of the license was not in any single character, but in the interaction of the team, and at the time trying to do it with six people on the screen all running around just wasn’t appetizing – the interface was just very, very difficult to design. I think the best way I can describe this is as a Playstation version of Diablo, except you control more than one character. You have a team, and you build your team up.

On Playstation Museum, we can read more details:

Get Ready To Rage!
Enter a radical gaming evolution blending a full-on assault of real-time combat action with elements of strategic role-playing. Badrock, Diehard, Riptide, Battlestone, Chapel… Youngblood takes on the most grotesque gauntlet of abominations a DNA experiment ever spewed out. Guide 11 heroes on a series of complex, real-time missions from secret labs to the depths of hell itself! Counter Giger. Find the Drachma codex. Oh yeah… and save the world!
Features:
Guide the Youngblood team through 11 real-time missions that combine pulse-pounding action with strategic role-playing elements.
Battle through dense jungles, parched deserts, and smoldering volcanoes to the very pits of hell as mutant enemies grow more bizarre and violent.
You must destroy them before the evil Giger and the traitor, Dr. Leviticus, finds the Drachma Codex, the secret to global domination.
Players can build, train, and hone the skills of the team members.
Take direct control of any hero or command an entire squadron.
Employ R&D to create powerful, new super weapons.
2-player cooperative option, real-time combat action, and more.

Still according to Playstation Museum, it seems the game was cancelled due to major technical issues, as late former programmer Eric Peterson wrote:

There were three things that really killed it. One was the AI, and one was memory. They had a fairly cute system for pathfinding, but they ran out of memory and made the pathfinding map one-fourth the resolution of the displayed landscape, botching it. Basically no AI movement worked, after that. It would have been a huge task to carve it out and put in something that worked, and I was steeling myself up for it when, mercifully, the end came. Fixing the AI would have meant fixing the memory management, which was huge and hideous. For example, the audio system used 1/8 of the PlayStation’s memory just for its data structure — that’s with no audio samples loaded.
Another, more technical problem, was the cavalier attitude that was taken with handling global variables in the code. All the character code modules were just copies of each other with minor changes, so global variables were declared many times. The worst side effect of this was when global pointers came into play — the very first example I looked at had a global pointer declared six times with four different data types, which was then referenced (extern-ed) in twelve more modules in six different types. The poor compiler didn’t know which one you were talking about, so it just used (I believe) the last one processed as it worked its way through a build. This means that any of the declared variables could be the one used in any particular build of that code module, with no way to tell which it was. General instability and hard-to-find bugs were the result. Trying to chase down the thousands of global variable collisions were what took all the time.
Remember, this monstrosity was nine times the size of the biggest thing I’d ever worked on, Mechwarrior 2. The sheer amount of code made any major surgery a monumentous undertaking. The way it was written made practically everything major surgery.

He added on Lost Levels forums:

Youngblood was something like 2 years in development when the lead programmer quit. I was brought in to salvage the project.
I designed and wrote most of MechWarrior 2. Youngblood, a 2D tiler, was nine times the size and had six times as many modules. There was one spot where there was an “#ifdef Playstation”, followed by a bunch of code, and then an “#ifdef Macintosh” (ditto), and an “#ifdef Saturn” thrown in there somewhere, and SIX THOUSAND LINES DOWNSTREAM was the “#endif” with no comment.
It probably took months to do, and none of it was even getting compiled.
I did a quick couple of tests. At least ninety percent of the comments were wrong, because all the modules were just copied from one another. He’d write some horrible buggy thing, and then (this is not an exaggeration) make 27 copies of it, one for each character.
When I first tried to compile it, MSDev gave 3500 warnings.
Youngblood originally took a minute and a half to load to the title screen, and would leak several tens of megabytes. Pro Tip: don’t null a pointer before you free it. Especially in 27 different modules.

A former animator corroborated:

I think Eric already addressed this issue in his assessment. Like he said it ran out of memory in the pathfinding for A.I. and the resolution of the environment maps suffered for it.

A demo for the PC was made available in some video games magazines, and is still playable today. You can download it here.

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Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Aliens: Colonial Marines [PS2 – Cancelled]

yota

14-10-2023

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Aliens: Colonial Marines is a cancelled squad-based First-Person Shooter video game developed by Check Six Studios and published by Fox Interactive and Electronic Arts, exclusively for the Playstation 2, from 2000 to 2002. It was based on the eponymous movie franchise, and was going to take place between the second and third films, with a rescue team of colonial marines and a salvage team who were went on a search-and-rescue mission for the missing United States Colonial Marines ship, Sulaco. It is not related to the 2013 game of the same name.

The game was officially revealed in May 2001 by EA and showed at E3. You would play as Lt. Nakamuri who could command up to 4 marines (from a pool of 12), all of which had their own personalities and skills. IGN was able to see the game in action and wrote:

Aliens: Colonial Marines pits players in a brand new story that follows the second movie in the series, Aliens. In short, the game begins as your ship discovers a drifting marine space ship floating far too close to a powerful sun that’s pulling it in at a rapid pace. Your team boards the seemingly empty ship, and then you discover a team of rogue scavengers has taken over the ship, hoping to steal equipment, food and resources of any kind. You also discover that aliens are onboard, and killing off the scavengers. As you fight off aliens and find the pilot cabin, you must redirect the vessel before it crashes into the sun.
In one of the early scenes in the game, you confront the alien queen in her egg chamber. She is laying hundreds of alien eggs, and when she notices you, she breaks off from her birthing carapace, and begins chasing you through the ship.
It is a squad-based game in which players can determine the shape of their squad, by simply pressing a button. There are several different configurations, among them a few shaped in a square, a dome, and a triangle, and the squad walks with you and protects you from rogue alien attacks.
The game is remarkable similar to Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation in its pace and look. Players don’t zip around the game like a standard FPS. Instead, you walk around, paced and are constantly on the lookout for alien attacks, which run out of different corridors in front and behind you when you least expect it. Many aspects of the movies have been incorporated into this game, including set design and sound. As you walk through the corridors, knocked out humans, incased in alien goo are strung up along the walls, some dead, and some still living. You can actually save the live ones, who will then join your squad. They will stay with you throughout the game, unless you are unlucky, in which instance they bear little baby aliens from their chest. Then you’re in trouble. (…)
The game moves a slow framerate right now, but the controls were imminently better than in Alien Resurrection, with quick response and rapid turnaround times. I was glad to finally play a game that played like the movies, and that is also good. Now they just have to speed the game up to 60 fps, speed up and tune the controls and work story-based scripts into the game, hopefully like in Half-Life or Red Faction, and they’ll have a hit on their hands.

Initially scheduled for a release in Fall of 2001, the title was pushed back to a release somewhere in Spring of 2002 and then for November of the same year, before being put on-hold by EA in May 2002. It was officially cancelled in October 2002 with EA citing that “there were no plans to pick up its development in the future”. The project was far from complete but no reason were given about why it was cancelled back then. In October 2018, Wumpagem got an interview from former Game Director Joel Goodsell. He explained briefly that Aliens: Colonial Marines was cancelled for technical issues:

Check Six also had a contract for an Alien Colonial Marines game being worked on simultaneously with Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. The game had some amazing lighting – on the order of what we see in Alien: Isolation or Dead Space – way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, performance and production issues killed that title.

It wasn’t until 2020-2021 that more lights were shared about the game thanks to a short investigating documentary by Youtuber Mr. FO1. AVPGalaxy repeated the words from developers Clancy John Imislund, Jamien McBride and Franck de Girolami:

I was a junior programmer for a short period of time on the project. When they were doing the concept, there were other kinds of brand new Xenomorphs and you would have to fight them in the game. Check Six was just too small of a company to make a game as big as Colonial Marines. Spyro: Enter the Dragon was basically funding the game. – Jamien McBride
I was a graphics artist at Check Six and did some work on Aliens and Spyro. I left after a couple of months because of how stressful the work schedule was. The codebase was very difficult to work in. – Franck de Girolami
Check Six got a deal with Maya and they were told to write a SDK for Maya so people can write games. When I started work, I was told to work on Aliens Colonial Marines instead of the SDK. I told the team at Check Six that it was terrible and broken and it needed to be documented so people could work on it. This caused some issues with Maya as four companies bought the SDK and returned it as it wasn’t documented. It was 70% done and the 70% that was, was terrible, slow, buggy and it crashed all the time.
One time, Check Six went to Fox with a DVD they’d burnt. It was a sequence showing the Queen and it worked perfectly prior to the visit. When they showed them the video, the Queen appeared but she was half faded. An explosion occurred which was faded because the shaders were buggy.
The last time they went to Fox, they burnt another DVD of the intro video which worked fine before that. When they showed Fox, the video plays and the game just crashes. You could make out a human character on the screen but the textures weren’t loading and it was about to have some dialogue when the video crashed. This was a surprise to Fox as they’d visited Check Six before and thought the game was looking great. It was at this point, Fox just cancelled the project altogether. – Clancy John Imislund

According to some developers, the game was broken into levels and was mission-based. There were three main acts in the game, and each one was made up of about seven levels. The first act took place on the USS Sulaco. It was hinted that the final act would take place on the aliens’ home planet. There were flamethrowers, pulse rifles with grenade-launcher attachments, and the shoulder-mounted smart gun. As for the aliens, alongside Facehuggers, Chestbursters, Warriors and Praetorians, new types were planned.

Although not related, it is worth mentionning that the second Aliens: Colonial Marines game, this time published by SEGA and initially made by Gearbox Software, also went into development hell as it was announced too soon, in December 2006. Gearbox worked briefly on it until the beginning of 2008 before being focus on the first Borderlands, which was itself modified from its initial form, before SEGA temporarly put on-hold the project in 2009 because of the economical crisis. The development was re-launched in the end of 2010 with TimeGate Studios as the main developer.

Images:

Images from the Gearbox Software prototype – circa 2008:

Videos:

2008 teaser from the Gearbox Software’s version

E3 2011 leaked TimeGate’s build:

Arcade, Others

Judge Dredd [Arcade – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

14-10-2023

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Judge Dredd is a cancelled Beat ’em up brawler game developed and published by Midway Games on the arcade, around 1992-1993. It featured digitized graphics and was based on the comic book serie of the same name.

The game reached a near-complete state, with 3 stages finished, and 3 bonus stages after each ‘main’ level. Each stage was different in some way, such as the first being a normal scrolling brawler-style stage, the second being closer to a platform game, and the third being a unique concept, where Dredd has to fight off waves of ‘block warriors’, making sure that the two ever-decreasing bars never reach the bottom- if one of them is emptied, the stage is over and has to be repeated. After the final level is beaten, the game ends with a preview for the next level, apparently featuring the character Judge Death from the comics.

Gaming Hell managed to get in touch with Jake Simpson, former programmer on Judge Dredd, and former artist Erik Kinkead. Both shared details about the development of the game and why it was ultimately cancelled:

So, after the success of Terminator 2 – The Arcade Game, Midway were looking for another movie license to make an arcade game out of, and since the Judge Dredd movie had been announced at the time, they decided to grab the license and beat the cinemas to it. Utilising a slightly-better form of digitised graphics than the original Mortal Kombat (pioneered in this game) it was planned for release in 1993. The inspiration came from a different source.
Jake Simpson: The actual premise of the game was it was supposed to be a cross between Mortal Kombat and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – we literally had one in my office to play, the 4 player version…
It’s a scrolling brawler! You should be familiar with what’s gonna go down by this point- just fight through waves of enemies, and beat the boss character at the end of the stage. In fairness, it’s a rather sophisticated one for its time, as each stage is different in some way, be it the controls or the mission objective. It’s definitely a different approach than the norm.
Jake Simpson: We wanted each level to have a different mechanic (although not too different) because at the time, no one else had done that, at least not in a brawler.
The layout is actually recycled from NARC, Williams‘ ultra-violent run-and-gunner.
Jake Simpson: The control panel was used because ‘everyone else said it had worked out well with Narc. This was my first game, so I just let it go. (…) The jumping level with the robots literally went in about a month before test. It was only because Eric had done some renders of robots and we looked at it them and went “What can we do with this?” – Eric and I built that alone very quickly… I’d never even attempted to code a platformer before and had no real idea what I was doing. (…)
Yes, some of the levels were too hard. They were absolutely designed to be quarter suckers. The trouble with games like this – story games – is that most of the time people will only play through once. This isn’t a sports or combat game where you play to test your skills against another player, so you replay. This is a once through kind of game, so we needed to take as many quarters as we could without pissing off the player, so things were definitely harder than they should be for playing for free on Mame.
After the third shooting gallery, the game abruptly ends and you’re greeted by this screen, which promises that “DEATH IS COMING….”. Obviously, the next stage would’ve involved Judge Death somehow, but how?
Jake Simpson: The last level was basically Judge Death in Resyk – he was reanimating corpses that were rolling out on a conveyor belt at the back of the screen and you were shooting them and him – you’d have your gun but it could be knocked out of your hand and you’d be manno e-manno until another one dropped into the level. The Judge Death stuff was about 60-70% done. We had Judge Death leaping around and attacking you, that much I do remember. I don’t remember if he was reanimating corpses though, even though I knew that was the plan.
Also, in case you’re wondering why Death looks so crazy-awesome here, it’s because he was a mannequin, much like Leglock and Goro from Mortal Kombat. Eric Kinkead was particularly impressed with it.
Erik Kinkead: Oh man, that Judge Death model was so awesome. At least, if not as cool as Goro. I would go into either Tim Coman or John Vogel‘s office and look at that thing constantly. Although that close up picture of him… Doesn’t do the model justice.
However, it was never released. Hell, it wasn’t even completed, but was playtested in Chicago. Unfortunately, the locaction test didn’t quite go to plan, so the plug was pulled on the project.
Jake Simpson: We were still relatively early in development to be testing – normally the game doesn’t go out on test till it’s 100% complete and we weren’t – but we were starting to get glimmers of the fact that this wasn’t going to be great and we wanted to know early so we could just put a bullet in it and stop wasting our time, if that was the case.
I think part of the reason we did abandon it was because it *was* such a labor of love, and it just wasn’t living up to our expectations, either in what the game was or how it was doing on test.
We never finished it because we put it out on test and it just didn’t do great numbers… I remember having a bug that crashed the game in the block wars and that totally destroyed our on test numbers. I remember at the time NBA JAM was out, Mortal Kombat was out, and our numbers were no where near theirs, so we all got very demoralized and just gave up. In retrospect we _should_ have finished this – Midway paid for the license and we should have completed it. We probably could have in a month. I remember the meeting where we all sat there and looked at each other and just shrugged and said “What were we thinking?”. We were young and stupid. Enough said.
Both Jake and Eric remember a different level that was cut- a Spy Hunter-esque racing stage using Dredd’s Lawmaster.
Jake Simpson: There was another level we had which got cut – the motorcycle chase. It was a top down thing, where you were on his bike and you had to chase a car on a high ramp over the city. The ramp was damaged so you had to jump sections… We cut it because honestly, it was no challenge. A few jumps, some left and right and that was it. Looked gorgeous though, but all that really nice Mega City At Night imagery took up way too much image space, so we cut it entirely.
Sadly, the Lawmaster chase stage was gutted from the location test version to make space for the Death stage.
Jake Simpson: The code for the Motorcycle was there, but none of the graphics were.
Fortunately, the game was preserved, to an extent- although only four boards were ever made, a version of the game slightly older than the version play-tested was dumped and is available to play in MAME.
Jake Simpson: Only 4 machines were made. I had one, that went to my sisters pub in the UK and was destroyed when that burnt down. One went to Tim Coman, one went to Mark Penacho and I’ve no idea where the last one ended up. I also have no idea how the roms got out into the world – I will say that they weren’t the final ones we put out in the world though.