Yu Suzuki has stated on several occasions that during its early stages, Shenmue was a traditional style RPG based on the characters and storyline of the hugely successful fighting game title Virtua Fighter. The Ryo character was simply Virtua Fighter character Akira to begin with. The final Ryo character has several key differences, but there is a very clear visual resemblance between him and Akira. As the game’s development progressed, the characters became original and the storyline moved away from its Virtua Fighter roots.
As the gaming industry became more aware of Sega’s next generation console towards the end of 1997 and beginning of 1998, Shenmue was also getting noticed. At this time, however, the game was only ever known as Project Berkley. Tech demos from the game were being used by Sega to show what the Dreamcast was capable of producing. Many of these sequences were very well developed, and some were even used in the final retail version of the game. This has led many to believe that Shenmue was probably one of the very first Dreamcast titles to begin production. Shenmue quickly became Sega’s flagship Dreamcast title – representing the systems powerful graphics capabilities and also its ability to render immersive, cinematic characters and settings. – [info from Wikipedia]
Castlevania: Resurrection, cancelled in March of 2000, was intended to be the seventeenth title in the Castlevania series for the short lived Sega Dreamcast console. This would also be the third Castlevania game, at the time, to enter the 3D realm. The game was to focus on Sonia Belmont and Victor Belmont, an 1800s vampire killer who had abandoned his lineage, in 1666, directly before Simon Belmont’s mission in the original Castlevania.
Greg Orduyan, the art director for the game, is so far the only staff member on the project to speak of how it would have worked out. Its cancellation is credited to many things, including disagreements between the Japanese and American Konami teams, and the death of the Dreamcast. It is rumored that Castlevania: Curse of Darkness uses some environments that were originally in this game. A beta copy was offered for sale for 3,000 Euros sometime around 2003 but then disappeared.
Thanks to DreamMare we have some more details about this lost project:
“Castlevania Resurrection was a game doomed from the start. When Konami first moved to San Francisco, this was one of the first projects started at the studio. I spent most of a year working on Bottom of the 9th 99 and this game was still in the early stages of pre-production. When I switched over to work on Spawn, the studio let go most of the team working on Castlevania and replaced it with the Bot9 team. A year later when I wrapped up Spawn and had taken a month long vacation I was brought onto the team and there had been much more advancement.
The team itself had a lot of troubles when I came on board. Most of the team had only ever worked on sports games so they had no idea how to make a 3D action platformer. The art team wasn’t very cohesive and couldn’t agree on a direction. The game had been in development for almost two years and had little to show. Personally, I discovered that my 3d skills had stagnated from lack of use and I was struggling to hit the quality the others were achieving. I had been at the office almost everyday for almost 3 years at this point and was suffering from severe burn out which didn’t help.
After only a few months on this team I decided I had to quit. I wasn’t having fun making games and I missed Canada. In my resignation letter I stated I would never work in games again. Just goes to show that young people in their 20’s really don’t know anything. A few months after leaving, the game was cancelled and entire studio was closed down.”
The Art Director as we know is Greg Orduyan. The Director of the game was Norio Takemoto. The CGI Director was Jenny Ryu (AKA Jenny Chang): thanks to fans of the time they discovered her digital portfolio and they put it on WayBackMachine:
“This is the Konami game project that was my introduction into the game industry. I met many talented artists there. We worked very hard and did great work to make the game. However, Dreamcast was going out of business. So finally this wonderful game got canceled. It was so sad but I know that these things happen in this industry”
It seems Jenny had to make a CGI model for Resurrection’s protagonist twice: one for the “Green Sonia” and another for “White Sonia”.
The Most well-known person on the team is probably Mark Lindsey, who created music for the game. According to Greg Orduyan of Castlevania Dungeon some presumed Castlevania Resurrection songs leaked online were just on the same CD but were not really meant for the game.
Also Capt. Gravestone put to together a great “Collector’s Guide” for Castlevania Resurrection with information, previews, details on the story, you can download it in PDF from here (5 MB).
Thanks to Celine for some of these screens! And Ryo Suzuki for the magazine scan.
Agartha is a cancelled horror adventure that was planned by the French software house No Cliche (author of titles like Toy Commander) for the Sega Dreamcast. Development began in 2000 and the game promised to have an interesting plot and gameplay:
During the winter of 1929 in a Romanian village that was partially destroyed by a landslide that occurred during a mysterious earthquake, a subterranean city exists called Agartha. This is where evil is being kept prisoner and is desperate to escape. Kirk the human hero will encounter a series of characters from villages, the living dead, fanatics from an evil sect, monsters, demons, solider monks, priests, archangels and the Sentinel who is the ultimate personification of evil. As Kirk you can decide to save as many innocent people as possible or to trigger the arrival of chaos on earth. As Kirk’s morals waver between good and evil, this ambiguity changes the aims of the adventure and the narration of the story.
Agartha’s gameplay was probably going to be similar to Alone in the Dark, D2 and Silent Hill, players had to explore the snowed mountains and villages, resolving puzzles and fighting against monsters / demons that lived in there. The game progress was influenced by the players’ choices, which could have decided whether to help innocent people and seal the evil town, or let them to die and help demons to destroy our planet. An online mode of some sort could have been planned too.
No Cliche’s horror adventure could have been an awesome addition to the Dreamcast’s library, however in 2001, Sega went out of the console business. Sadly No Cliche had to cancel Agartha, close down and laid off most of its staff.
Akolyte is an action game that was in development by Ionos for the Dreamcast, but the project was canned and the studio was closed. There are rumors about a released PC version of Akolyte, but we still need to find a confirmation.
Ecco the Dolphin 2: Sentinels Of The Universe is a cancelled adventure game and the unreleased sequel to Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, that was developed by Appaloosa Interactive for the Dreamcast. There is not a lot of information available about this cancelled sequel, but it seems that a collector found a playable beta version in a Dreamcast development kit. If you know more about Ecco 2 for the Dreamcast, please leave a message below!
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