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Action Adventure

Shining Sword is a cancelled action adventure that was in development by American Laser Games for the original Playstation. The game was meant to be an ambitious projects, but after a while the team fell into various development issues and Shining Sword had to be canned. Some details were shared by a former ALG developer on Wikipedia:

Yes I worked for ALG – in fact I was the first artist ever hired at the company, in 1993. I worked on Shining Sword for about a year. We had switched from 3DO titles to developing for the not yet released Sony playstation. We had some of the first devkits in the US at the time. There was a really long drawn out story that was full of every dungeons and dragon style cliche you can imagine. We had concept art for most of the main characters and first pass 3d models of all of them. We were using stretchy meshes with internal bones, which was kind of ahead of its time a little bit. Some of the staff worked in 3D studio for DOS, some worked on Lightwave, and some actually worked on Silicon Graphics workstations. I had built several environments including an Aztec style Temple level.
Unfortunately, the owner’s wife had gotten heavily involved in the company and convinced him and other investors to switch over to making games for girls, so games like shining sword were on the chopping block. To be honest, I think the game was never really a game, it was a bunch of ideas kind of stuck together and it suffered through a lot of rehashings. It was extremely derivative of other games, and wholly unoriginal, but I don’t think there were any copyright worries.
Getting a working game engine and tools for the playstation was a daunting task in itself, not to mention trying to make a successful title. In my opinion, Shining sword was more style than substance, and really never developed much style either. Somebody may have saved the original code, but one would need an SDK for the original playstation – it would be a complete waste of time to try to get it running.
When the company was restructured into “Her Interactive”, I and some others were laid off. I moved on to California to Novalogic, making Comanche 4 and a few other military games before switching over the Neversoft as Lead Artist and eventually Environment Art Director, where I helped create the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, Gun, and Guitar Hero III before leaving the biz.

Thanks to Pachuka and Discworld for the contributions!

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Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Vandals [PSX/Saturn – Cancelled?]

monokoma

03-05-2008

No Comments

ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! :)

ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! :)

[Thanks to Pachuka for the contribution!]

Images:

Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Incredible Idiots in Space [Playstation, Saturn, PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

03-05-2008

2 Comments

Incredible Idiots in Space is a cancelled comedy action adventure that was in development by Magnet Interactive Studios around 1995 / 1996, planned to be released on Playstation, Sega Saturn and PC. The game was going to be published by ASC Games / American Softworks Corporation, based on an original cartoon series conceived by David Burke who had a number of artists develop a few cartoon properties to pitch them to TV networks, animation studios and the game industry. As recalled by David:

“I pitched my cartoon properties to game publishers, selling them on the notion that by licensing and co-developing my original properties, they would have a significant interest in the TV and merchandising rights, instead of none if they continued spending millions on licensing existing franchises. Sold a few: Psycho Mice, X-Duck 2000. X-Duck-2000 had lots of promise (hilarious script and great graphics), but mid-project, the developer / publisher (R. Greenberg Associates Interactive – a well-known NY special effect house), abandoned the “interactive” part of business.”

Later David licensed the game rights to “Incredible Idiots in Space” (a property created as a TV cartoon) to ASC, collaborating with cartoon artist Lane Reichart (“Reboot” and other toons) to finalize their character design. David wrote the script and sketched the basic character designs, and Lane fleshed out the world, and supplied the finished artwork. Magnet Interactive’s 3D artists rendered backgrounds and characters well, but development immediately proved to be problematic.

Incredible Idiots in Space would have featured some ambitious gameplay for its time, with 3D exploration through a large universe and multiple dialogue interactions between more than 30 unique aliens (requiring a complex script following each branching path). Story would have been told using pre-rendered cutscenes and voice overs, with gameplay also offering an alien version of Kung Fu combat, and all sorts of original puzzle-solving. Designs for the entire game world, the many alien characters, the ships, and the props, were all completed, and all the elaborate interactive game scripts were written. Unfortunately coding proved challenging. After waiting too long for playable prototypes ASC just pulled the plug.

Thanks to Pachuka & Celine for the contributions. Huge thanks to David for sharing with us some memories of his canned project.

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Videos:

Saturn, Sega

Waterworld [Saturn – Cancelled]

yota

03-05-2008

11 Comments

Waterworld is a cancelled action game based on the film of the same name, that was planned to be released for the Sega Saturn. As noted in an interview by Ross Sillifant:

Ross: Ocean’s Waterworld: vapourware?
Mike Fullton: No Idea. I don’t recall that we had done anything with Ocean beyond talking. I can’t recall any projects getting started.

Thanks to Mekanaizer for the video!

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Video:

Unseen News

[Resolved!] Ernald: an unreleased SNES RPG? Not really.

monokoma

30-04-2008

5 Comments

This game was though to be unreleased, as it was not possible to find “Ernald” in the release list for SNES games, but after some researches by Pat & Robert Seddon (as you can read below the post, in the comment section) we have found out that this was just an early “translation” of the original japanese name (Elnard) for 7th Saga, released in 1993. Thanks to everyone! :)

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