Created by Silicon Knights, Eternal Darkness was an interesting game for the nintendo 64 that seemed to be able to bring new life to the Survival Horror creating the first “psychological thriller”. However, it was later ported to the Gamecube. Was it really never released for the Nintendo 64 or it was just an insanity effect ?
For more information check our article about eternal darkness
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Shadowgate Rising was an adventure game game developed by Infinite Ventures for the Nintendo 64 but was never released. Originally intended to be a sequel to the 1999 title Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers and the latest entry to the franchise which began in 1987 with the original Shadowgate for the Mac. The project was abandoned because the Nintendo 64 was soon to be replaced by the GameCube. [Info from Wikipedia]
Screens & more info: Nintendo Fanatical – Original Article Written by Dave R. T. Allwein | December 9, 2003 (Archive.org Backup)
Nintendo’s official website had a bit of information on Rising’s storyline. “Shadowgate Rising-which is still only a tentative title-takes place centuries after Shadowgate 64. The belief of magic has faded, but now the unspeakable evil of Kal Torlin has slowly begun to reawaken. The fate of the land lies in the hands of a young woman who gradually discovers strange powers within herself and the ability to control magical artifacts within the alls of Shadowgate.”
Gjon Camaj, president of Image Space, had once stated that Shadowgate Rising made it into development. According to Image Space’s website, “In a short amount of time, ISI was able to create a development environment that allowed the artists to create assets on their PCs and then emulate them on the same machine, as it would appear on a Nintendo 64 game console. This ability saved time and the need to “burn” cartridges every time work needed to be reviewed.” This made it easier to test Shadowgate Rising. On the downside, the chances of this game surfacing are rather slim. A few months after the Nintendo 64 version had been officially canned, Image Space considered finishing up Rising and pushing a PC release. This never happed and the game was left totally unreleased.
ShadowMan is an action adventure game developed by Acclaim Studios Teesside and published by Acclaim Entertainment. It was designed by Guy Miller and Simon Phipps. It is loosely based on the Shadowman comic book series published by Valiant Comics and was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, Sega Dreamcast and PC. [Info from Wikipedia]
In the gallery below you can see a series of beta screenshots from a very early version of the game: the 3D model of the main character was still incomplete and different from its final one, the tree looked nothing like the final ones and even the scenario shown in these images seems to have been removed or changed in the released game. Probably Acclaim worked a lot on the game, to create a title that was really good for its time.
Below you can also see a video from a leaked early beta demo of ShadowMan:
For anyone interested here’s a very early shadowman demo from 1997, its really basic, has differerent models/ sounds to the game. If you burn it to a disc and run it you get to here the ingame audio,
* To start press space on title page
* space to jump cursers to move
* W – wireframe on/off
* H – get lighter
* Y – get darker
* R – respawn
* F6 – free cam on
* F5 – Free cam off
* esc – to quitfor best results burn it to a CD and run it from there
Credit to the following pages:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/15818496890/
There you can find some of the original developers of the pc game, as Tim Haywood (composer of the awesome music of the game) and Trevor Storey (game designer)
http://shadowman.freeforums.org/index.php
It´s a forum create by Tim Haywood, good things in there.
As BO3000B wrote as a comment to the beta video on Youtube:
I just recently played through it and don’t really recognize anything in this video. Louisiana is the only part that looks vaguely like the final game. This must’ve been really early in development.
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“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!
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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!
Some images from www.flickr.com/photos/mikedailly/sets/
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