News on Cancelled Video Games & Lost Media

Enemy in Sight is the cancelled spiritual sequel to the Hidden and Dangerous series, in development around 2005 by Illusion Softworks and Pterodon (later merged and acquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2008, renamed as 2K Czech) and planned to be published by Atari for PC and Xbox. It was conceived as a new multi and single player military shooter, set on 100-square km battlefield. The team wanted to offer interactive environments deformable by explosions, where players could drive military vehicles (tanks, airplanes):

“Centred around a great war between superpowers in the very near future, the game focuses on first person action set within vast battle landscapes. Massive online multiplayer capabilities enhance the sheer scale and dramatic impact of the fire fights and battles within the sprawling, realistic environments. Every building can be destroyed, the landscape is fully deformable, and players can command any of over 25 vehicles in the game, all based on their real-life counterparts and painstakingly designed to scale.”

Some details were shared in an interview by Gamespot with former Atari producer Peter Wyse:

“GameSpot: Give us a brief overview of Enemy in Sight.
Peter Wyse: The cold war never died. It just went into a deep freeze until global events brought it to a full boil. You are a soldier in today’s army. You are called into action to fight a conventional war between Russian and American forces using today’s latest technology. You have all of the modern weapons of war at your disposal, from the latest machine guns to the laser-guided missile launchers, from modern tanks to state-of-the-art helicopters.
GS: Tell us about Enemy in Sight’s multiplayer. Will it emphasize team play over lone-wolf tactics?
PW: Modern warfare is about team play and team tactics. We could not build a credible multiplayer game using modern weaponry without building scenarios and battlefields that will rely heavily on team tactics. So there will be scenarios that force players to combine ground, air, and artillery support to strike a target. But we do recognize that going it alone has its own appeal, and for those players that want to test their limits against overwhelming odds, we have created Green Beret mode.
GS: Tell us about the actual gameplay. Could you disclose the modes at this point? Is the game going to be focused on head-to-head deathmatching or on goal-oriented gameplay?
PW: The single-player mode is very objective-oriented, as you’ll be defending or attacking key targets, engaging enemies, establishing new frontlines, and collecting intelligence, to name a few of the scenarios. But the multiplayer and quick-play modes support a number of different scenarios and allow you to tailor your gameplay experience to your own flavor and speed. For example, if all you want to do is drive tanks and run through buildings, there will be scenarios that are very tank-centric. We’ll announce the specific modes at a later date, but variety of gameplay is not an issue.”

Soon the project vanished and in May 2006 Atari sold the project to another publisher due to financial problems. In 2007 part of the Illusions Softworks team left the studio and most of the remaining developers had to focus their efforts on finishing Mafia II, finally released in 2010

Thanks to Daniel Nicaise for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Jason Bourne: Treadstone (Radical Entertainment) [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3]

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12-12-2019

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Treadstone is a cancelled action video game based on the Jason Bourne novel series by Robert Ludlum, that was in development by Radical Entertainment (The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Prototype) around 2007 – 2008 for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The Bourne license was revived in 2002 through a new film series and another Bourne video game titled “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy” was already published in 2008.

The name of the game was taken from a top-secret black ops program of the CIA in the Jason Bourne series of novels and movies. This cancelled Treadstone game was never officially announced by the company, but footage was leaked online around 2011 and some details were already rumored around 2008 thanks to an article by Variety’s Ben Fritz:

“What is Treadstone?” you ask, in your best Matt Damon impersonation. According to Variety “it’s a multi-player online game set in the world of the spy agency that trained Bourne.” We’ll assume that contraction is short for “it was” because, whad’ya know, “production has stopped” on the project. Perhaps once Ludlum Entertainment finds a new publisher for Bourne, whatever work Radical has already invested in “Treadstone” will find a new home, but that sounds unlikely to us.”

It seems the game was canned because of Activision Blizzard’s merge and their abandonment of the Bourne property rights once owned by Sierra / Vivendi (among all of their other IPs), of which they did not want to publish another game:

“Activision Blizzard is also reviewing Sierra’s other properties that they will not be publishing: think Bourne, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, World in Conflict, et al. Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith says, “We are reviewing our options regarding those titles that we will not be publishing.” Those games won’t be published by Blizzavision because they’re not “a strong fit with [Activision Blizzard’s] long-term product strategy.” No word on the fate of Sierra’s classic adventure games like King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.
As for the status of Sierra’s in-house developers, Blizzavision will “realign staffing at Radical Entertainment and High Moon Studios” – the developers of Prototype and The Bourne Conspiracy respectively – while “exploring options regarding Massive Entertainment and Swordfish Studios” – the devs behind World in Conflict and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, respectively. Those “options” include “the possibility of divestiture.”

Some more details on the game development and cancellation were published online by a former employee who worked on the project:

“After wrapping up my work on Prototype I moved onto a new project helping to build a new team and new game. We went on to create an action adventure playable game demo in the spy genre. In less than a year while developing a new engine and building a new team we delivered an “open neighborhood” playable demo with cover based gunplay, vehicles and parkour style locomotion.
In 2008 Activision and Vivendi merged. The above mentioned project was cancelled for several reasons. They said the game looked great but needed to turn into something else. They expressed their decision with the fact they already had the James Bond Franchise, and stated several other decision points based around the IP and the game’s potential returns.”

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GameCube, Nintendo

Metroid Prime 1.5 [GameCube – Cancelled Pitch]

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09-12-2019

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Metroid 1.5 was an undeveloped new game in the Metroid Prime series, internally pitched at Retro Studios between the development of Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. This lost project was found in 2011 thanks to online research by Mama Robotnik on the NeoGAF forum, who unveiled the Metroid 1.5 design document written by former Metroid Prime designer:

“This adventure would take place immediately after Samus takes off from the surface of Talon IV. Upon exiting the planets surface, Samus decides to take a long rest in her Cryo chamber as her ship autopilots home. However, something goes wrong and Samus’s ship computer hones in on a distress signal. The distress signal is coming from a huge alien vessel (huge, like the size of several Star Destroyers) that is drifting out in space. As Samus’s ship approaches the alien craft, a tractor beam activates and the Ship is pulled into one of the gigantic docking bays. As the ships doors close, the gigantic vessel folds and enters a parallel dimension, thus begins Samus’ new adventure

Upon awakening, the ship appears to be abandoned, there is no power except for auxiliary lights and telemetry from computers. It is up to Samus to unravel this mystery. The mystery being that the ships AI has gone mad and the ship is actually a war vessel that is on a collision course with a peaceful planet. Its goal? The entire enslavement of the race of beings on said planet as well as natural resource stripping as its (the planets) destruction. So in essence, the ship AI has split into several different personalities, and is playing a deadly game with Samus. The Alien inhabitants of the ship are also in a state of suspended animation because as the ship travels through the parallel dimension, the alien inhabitants are being created and refined for warfare until the ship arrives at its destination and assaults the planet. However, the robotic and automated entities are not, these will be the primary enemies that Samus must deal with. In addition, Samus must also deal with the ships cunning AI, who will all the while be taunting her and trying to trick her at every opportunity.”
“The Main reason Samus and possibly other Bounty Hunters are being pulled into this ship is to assimilate their best and most deadly abilities into the personality construct of not only the ships AI, but also into the actual Alien Inhabitants in order to further their quest for perfection. As the ship reaches its target, it will unfold into this dimension and begin its attack. This has what the ship and Alien race who created it has have been doing for past thousand or so years, going from planet to planet, assimilating the most violent parts of a culture and asserting it into its own being.

The main goal for Samus is to disable the engines of the ship, destroy the AI, and eradicate all life forms on the ship. The catch is that even though Samus is all powerful from her previous item acquisition on Talon IV, she will be limited to use them in certain areas of the ship due to the containment matrix that the Rogue AI has set up all over the ship. This will force the player to handle situations differently than expected, and once the containment matrix is disabled, Samus will be free to use all of her abilities. Due to being in a parallel dimension, there are areas within the ship where floors may become ceiling due to gravity being reversed, Time may run backwards, (illustrated by creatures and machines moving in reverse, water moving up into a faucet) and other sorts of environmental weirdness, that Samus as well as other Bounty hunters will have to learn to adjust to in order to survive.”
“Mad AI, the central computer of the ship has gone crazy, it sees inviting Samus onto the ship as a game for its amusement. Will taunt and try to trip Samus up at every move. The Mad AI has four distinct personalities: The Child, The Killer, the Martyr, and the Fool each one is deadly and utilizes different tactics and techniques.”

This cancelled project was meant to have a short development time, to release it shortly after the first Metroid Prime while the main team would take their time to develop the true sequel:

“So this is pretty much what I think we could crank out in a year, A Smaller Adventure with expanded mechanics and a few new ones thrown in. The beauty of spaceship design is that a lot of corridors and hub rooms can be reused over and over again, with minor variation; it also lends itself well to our room/door/hall layout. Plus, we can make the world denser by exploiting the super structure of the ship using morphball mechanics. Even though the idea of an AI gone mad has been used before in games as well as films, I feel that we could put a unique twist on it. And by allowing Samus to use only certain abilities in certain parts of the game, we can get a fair amount of replay value by offering the player different solutions to a single problem. This I feel would satisfy gamers who completed Prime and are hungry for something more with a few new mechanics and ideas thrown in.
With the addition of the co-op multiplayer components I have noted in the previous paragraphs, I feel that we would still have a game that feels like Metroid, albeit the feeling of Isolation would no longer be there, at the expense of the multi-player experience. However, I think the by unlocking the additional multi-player modes, after the actual game is completed, it won’t detract from the experience. Unlike TimeSplitters 1 and 2, we can keep the player focused on the main portion or adventure of the game which is what Metroid is all about.”

Concept art was also found in the design doc and on the websites of other former Retro Studios developers. You can find a deep-dive into the document’s details on Wikitroid.

Images:

PSP, Sony

MediEvil Legends [PSP – Cancelled]

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09-12-2019

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MediEvil Legends is a cancelled hack & slash developed by ChocChip Moose team for Sony as a part of the MProf Games Development course. This prototype was based on a brief given by Sony to students of the course with plans to possibly fully developed it into a PSP Mini commercial release.

While this should be considered a course-prototype and never announced by Sony as an official MediEvil game, some details were found online by fans:

“For the second semester, we were given the task of developing a small prototype by Sony that could be carried over and fully developed for sale as a PSP Mini game. The game was part of the established Sony franchise MediEvil and the concept was Dan retelling the story of his heroic deeds in the form of tall tales to his fellow heroes that the player had to relive. It took the form of a simple 3D top-down hack and slasher with humorous dialogue and banter between the listening heroes and Dan. This game was also developed in PhyreEngine.”
“The gameplay was a linear set of enemy waves, each wave getting progressively harder by spawning more enemies for longer periods of time. in addition, the final prototype contained 5 different enemy types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The zombies, numerous and weak, the mummies, rare but significantly tougher and hard-hitting, Scarecrows, extremely fast and agile, Headless zombies who run in straight lines very fast across the map, bouncing off walls and providing both comic relief and a surprising hazard, and Shadow Demons, deadly, fast and tough.
Waves were interspersed with humorous dialogue between Dan recounting his tale, and the heroes listening in, chiming in with their own comments and version of events, mocking and supporting Dan’s achievements.”

In the end sony never completed the MediEvil Legends prototype into a full PSP game and it soon became a lost and forgotten project.

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Microsoft, Xbox 360

Hero Mix [Cancelled – Xbox 360]

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09-12-2019

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Hero Mix is a cancelled music game / music tool that was in development by 7 Studios around 2010, planned to be published by Activision on Xbox 360 (and possibly Playstation 3). As you can assume by its title it was meant to be part of Activision’s Hero series of music games, composed of such games as Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Band Hero and the cancelled Sing Hero, Dance Hero and Drum Hero.

Activision never announced this game officially, but some screenshots with mock-up UI were found online by fans in 2013. By looking at these we can speculate you would have been able to mix together different songs by playing some kind of rhythm game. Basically it could have followed the same premise of other Hero music games, but with mixing mechanics instead than playing a plastic guitar or DJ set.

In the end the Hero music game market collapsed and Activision just canned all the remaining projects still in development:

“In October 2009, following the completion of DJ Hero, Activision laid off an estimated 30 people from 7 Studios, about half of the team. In February 2011 Activision announced to discontinue all music games series. On 9th February 2011 staff members confirmed that 7 Studios had been shut down.”

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