“The Dead Ahead project was a very unsual one. The game was being funded by Tomei, but there was also a middle company; Optical Entertainment who was also involved. Optical were designing the game for Tomei and Software Creations were chosen by Tomei (Tomy) to develop it. It was a very ambitious design which included free roaming in large environments, fighting, vehicle use and puzzle solving. One of the intentions of the game was to, at some point, create Toys based on the main characters. I was responsible for managing the team developing the game. Even before production started, this was already known as the “hot-potatoe” project that nobody wanted to do. Myself and the team made a good account of ourselves, but the game was never finished.” – Haydn
Thanks to Haydn Dalton for the great contribution!
Thanks a lot to Gilgalegrouik for some of these images!
Attack! was an action game developed by DMA Design (the same software house responsible for Body Harvest and Silicon Valley) that was officially announced in april 1999. It was described as a Spiritual successor to Lemmings and gaming magazine at the time wrote that it was planned for PC, Playstation and N64. Edge saw design sketches littering walls of DMA HQ during a visit. Game was described as “Millwall supporters let loose in Jurassic Park’ and set to feature a range of diminutive dino’s.” It seems, however, that the game was going to be released only for the pc.
Mike Dailly that worked at DMA, wrote:
“Well, Attack was never for the N64, it was a PC only (at the time) title and was canned well before other ports were started or even considered.”
There is virtually no information about it, and the only images that we have are some artworks. Judging from these few pics that we managed to recover, Attack was set in the prehistory, and the protagonist was going to be a caveman. According to some rumors, the main character was able to tame the various creatures and use them to advance in the game. The project was potentially very interesting: the titles that DMA developed for the nintendo 64 had many innovative features that were later used as the foundations for some successiful titles. In the autumn of 1999, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar and renamed Rockstar North, the team that two years later created GTA III.
[English translation by yota]
Thanks a lot to Gilgalegrouik for some of these images and to Ross Sillifant for the contribution!
Spooky is a cancelled action game that was in development by ICE (International Computer Entertainment), shown for the first time in October 1997, but later vanished without any official statement. The gameplay was going to be somehow similar to Freak Boy, another unreleased Nintendo 64 game. The player would had to save a bizarre alien world, from the menace of the “ArchMorph”, an evil alien race survived after a major disaster. The screenshots in the gallery below seem to be taken from a target render, as the graphic looked a bit too much nice for a N64 title.
As in Freak Boy, the protagonist would have been able to mutate into three different forms, to resolve puzzles and to fight better. In the game’s levels we had to collect 30 pieces of a mirror, to be able to “absorb” the evil Arch-Morph, transform into it and be able to win the fight. Sadly Spooky was never finished, probably because ICE never found a publisher interested in the project and the N64 software market was in serious decline at the time.
Konami was one of the first software houses to announce full support for the Nintendo 64, after the happy and profitable experience with the SNES. In addition to Castlevania 64, one of the first games announced for the console was Hybrid Heaven, a strange cross-game between Turn-based RPG, action, adventure and fighting, that promised an open ended gameplay.
In the early images and videos released, the project had an incredible graphic for its time, much more definited than the one in the final version. When Hybrid Heaven was finally released after many delays, players found themselves in front of a very different game, graphically poor and with a linear gameplay.
Probably the early media released were just Concept Renders and when Konami started to create the game on the real N64 hardware, they found out that it was impossible to reach such level of details. We dont know exactly how many parts were removed (some places and characters seen in the concept renders were not in the final game), but we can speculate that the developers had to heavily cut the project, because their original concept was too ambitious for its time.
[spoiler /Clicca qui per la versione in Italiano/ /Nascondi la versione in Italiano/]La Konami fu una delle primissime Software House ad annunciare il pieno supporto alla nuova macchina a 64 Bit di casa Nintendo, dopo le felici e redditizie esperienze con lo SNES. Oltre al precedente Castlevania 64, uno dei primi giochi annunciati fu questo Hybrid Heaven, strano incrocio fra RPG a turni, azione, esplorazione e picchiaduro. Dalle primissime immagini il titolo faceva graficamente paura e sembrava avere tutte le potenzialità per divenire l’ennesima Killer Application per l’N64. Eppure, quando il gioco finalmente venne completato dopo anni di ritardi, i giocatori si trovarono davanti un prodotto molto diverso, graficamente povero e dalla giocabilità fin troppo lineare. Del progetto originale probabilmente si era salvato ben poco.[/spoiler]
Montezuma’s Return is a action adventure game and the sequel to the original Parker Brothers game Montezuma’s Revenge. It was released for PC in 1998: a Nintendo 64 version was planned too, but it was cancelled for unknow reasons. A screenshot from the presumed N64 version was shown in an old issue of Nintendo Power, but it could have been taken from the PC version.
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