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Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose [PC – Prototype]

Damnation is a Far West steampunk Third-Person Shooter/Platformer action game developed by Blue Omega Entertainment, Liquid Development and Point of View, Inc., and published by Codemasters in May 2009, for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game originally started as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, sometimes named Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose, and was entered into Epic Games first Make Something Unreal contest:

Return to the West that never was in this genre-blending total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2004. Equipped with an array of steam-powered weaponry, acrobatic skills, and mystic Spirit Powers only you stand against a ruthless, mechanized foe. A self-styled “steampunk fantasy-western,” Damnation stands apart, providing the gaming community with not only fresh, new gameplay, but an untapped world to explore as well. Damnation is a new breed of gaming experience. As a first/3rd person action/adventure title, Damnation’s gameplay is unprecedented. Combining the immersion and precision-gunplay of a traditional first-person shooter like Call of Duty with the navigational puzzle design of 3rd-person adventure titles like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Damnation is a new paradigm in genre-blending gameplay.

In September 2005, the team wrote a postmortem on BeyondUnreal about what was going to be their next plan about the project:

We sit here, now, in the newly formed office of Blue Omega Entertainment and look forward to starting full production of the retail version of Damnation in just over a month. The lessons we learned from the prototype have strongly shaped the structure of this new development studio. Since our Grand Finals submission, we have completely stopped development of the mod. We have spent the last four months doing nothing but preproduction. We have meticulously planned out our design docs, production pipelines, and schedule. Everything that went wrong with the prototype has been addressed and reworked from the ground up.

Most prototypes aren’t as fully realized as Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose. We didn’t necessarily need to put as much effort and time as we did into creating polished art assets just to test out the game design. Given the chance to do it over, I don’t think we would change that though. Taking the art production pipeline as far as we did on the prototype showed us where all the holes were. It taught us what we could outsource and what absolutely had to stay in-house. We were able to make mistakes that on the full game could have cost us millions, but on the mod were only annoyances.

In the end, even though we didn’t win the license, we feel that the prototype was a success. We were able to test out our game design and get tons of great feedback from the mod community. We now know that we are more than capable of taking the Damnation concept to completion and we feel confident that it will be a great game. In fact, the lessons we learned about valuing quality over quantity ensure that whether the final game matches our current vision or not, it will be fun. We believe that that focus alone is enough to make it a success.

Blue Omega tried to pitch their Unreal Mod to develop it into a commercial game and when they found a publisher interested in the project, the team worked hard to expand Damnation into a full title for the then next gen consoles. But the development of this new version didn’t go as planned: officially revealed in March 2008 for a release planned in December of the same year, the title was pushed back in 2009 for a release in May. Damnation received unfavorable reviews by the press.

In January 2013, VentureBeat investigated with former Lead Game Designer Jacob Minkoff what went wrong during the development:

Damnation was intended to be something very special. The game germinated from a hybrid first/third-person action game entered into the first Make Something Unreal competition in 2004. While it didn’t win, production continued with a full retail release as the ultimate goal. Aspirations were high among the team, and its plans for the game were lofty.

Blue Omega was aiming high with Damnation. It wanted to create huge battlefields that player and adversary alike could traverse any way they saw fit. It was seeking to create both organic locations and enemies, throw the player into the mix, and watch the emergent gameplay spiral out of control in the most fantastic of ways. Things eventually did spiral, though no one, especially the player, benefited in the least.

“Damnation was a product of a green team that didn’t really know what they were doing. It was my first professional game development project; the same was true of many members of the core team.”

The eagerness of the team also led them to overlook the huge challenge set by the new console hardware they were developing for. “We were on the cusp of a new generation, and we learned lessons that have since become common knowledge in game development,” said Minkoff.

In trying to expand upon Damnation so dramatically while working with new hardware, Blue Omega tried to accomplish too much too soon. “Making a sprawling — theoretically — triple-A game on console and PC was simply too much for us to handle,” said Minkoff.

This problem was only exacerbated by the decision to outsource large portions of the game and maintain an uncommonly small in-house team. The strategy was originally intended to afford this core team the greatest level of flexibility and allow it to adapt throughout development. As Minkoff revealed, this simply was not the case in practice.

“Outsourcing was a problem,” he said. “You need the time, experience, and budget to turn on a dime — to throw out what you’ve made and try something else quickly, and within constraints. We did not have the resources or knowledge to do that at Blue Omega.”

This inflexibility, caused by inexperience and outsourcing, led to the game’s woefully protracted development cycle. Few games command four years to make, and when they do finally see release, it’s usually justified with high levels of polish and production value. This was the opposite for Damnation. The longer it stayed in development, the more out of touch and less impressive it became. Level architecture, A.I., textures, animations, movement, physics, audio mixing, sound effects, dialogue, cutscenes, acting, weapons, and general common sense all had their merits eroded over the years it took Damnation to gestate.

“In the end, you usually run out of time or money,” said Minkoff. “With Damnation, we ran out of both. One of the primary reasons why you see so much architectural reuse is because it was cheaper to pay for a retexture than all new geometry. It also took less time to do so, giving us more hope of us meeting our release date.”

It could have been a great game had the team been more experienced, focused, and time-efficient. Minkoff sees the silver lining: “Many games never ship at all because the investment to make the game simply pass console certification would be prohibitive. That it shipped at all is a triumph for Damnation’s team.”

His positivity likely emanates from where Damnation took him next and where he was able to take its fundamental concepts. After the game’s completion, Minkoff moved to Naughty Dog and designed some of the most memorable sections of the Uncharted sequels. There, he was finally able to realize his ambitions for Damnation thanks to an experienced team and appropriate resources.

That the similar yet vastly superior first Uncharted game was in development at the same time as Damnation and saw release two years earlier to critical acclaim is an irony that is not lost on Minkoff. Instead of wallowing in the past, however, he is looking toward the future and building upon his first game’s auspicious past.

“Everyone has to learn somewhere,” he said. “I learned on Damnation.”

More recently, someone claiming to be a close source from the developers wrote under a video by Youtuber Matt McMuscles:

I work for the guys who came up with and had it made. They hired a company to do the coding and worked with a publisher to get it out on the various platforms. It was coming along with issues, as the developer wasn’t listening to my boss, and then the publisher decided that they were tired of waiting and forced them to release it when it was half done. The original concept of the game was awesome, and would have been amazing if they actually made what he paid for. An alternate history of the US where the South won the Civil War, with the tension and conflicts that arise from having an enemy directly border you. With steampunk elements. It sounded really cool.

The retail version retains some of the mod’s gameplay such as the acrobatic moves and spirit vision.

The original Damnation 2004 mod can still be downloaded here.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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Titan A.E. [PSX / PC – Cancelled]

Titan A.E. is a cancelled action/shoot ’em up game developed by Blitz Games Studios and published by Fox Interactive, from 1999 to 2000, for the PC and the Playstation. It was based off the animated Sci-Fi adventure film of the same name.

In August 2000, Eurogamer got in touch with Philip Oliver, co-founder of Blitz Games Studios, who explained what happened during the development of the game:

“When Fox purchased the Don Bluth studios they started developing Anastasia, and we were asked to put a concept together for a PlayStation game. They were very impressed, but it was decided that Anastasia was not the right game for the PlayStation, and they produced an activity centre for PCs with somebody else instead. However, they promised that next time they had an opportunity, they would consider us first.”

“Then in January 1999 I got a call asking if we would be available to produce an arcade action game for the new film from Don Bluth – Planet Ice. We started work in March 1999, and a few months later the film was renamed Titan A.E.”

The game was based very closely on the movie, in which a young man by the name of Cale finds himself racing across the galaxy to save what is left of the human race, after the planet Earth was destroyed by a powerful but xenophobic alien species called the Drej. “The storyline of the film reads very much like the plot for a video game, and therefore it made perfect sense to follow the same story and let the player control Cale and Akima [the movie’s love interest], and escape from the Drej to find the Titan.”

The game’s settings and visuals were also closely based on the movie, and “Fox Animation (the Don Bluth group) sent us monthly updates of the film, as well as concept artwork and 3D models of things likes space ships. It’s only been in the last few months that we’ve needed audio, and they have been very supportive.”

It was showed at E3 2000, and IGN wrote some more details on the title:

(…) Titan A.E. pits players as either Cale or Akima as they fight Drej aliens and search for the lost ship known as Titan, which holds the secret to salvaging the last of the human race.

Players can take the game on in two ways, through a third-person action/adventure game, or through the cockpit of a ship. Environments and detailed characters will appear from the movie itself, and the story will parallel the movie, but it’s likely that the development team will take some creative license to create an engaging game on its own.

But only a month later, the project was cancelled after the movie bombed in the box-office:

IGN learned today that Fox Interactive has decided to halt the development of Titan A.E. for PlayStation. Previously set for a fall release in North America, the title was based on the animated film by Don Bluth that completely tanked at the U.S. box offices with a total gross of just over $22 million.

While the poor showing of the movie at the box office seems like a good enough reason to cancel the PlayStation game, according to a PR representative from Fox Interactive it was only one of many different factors that resulted in the decision to discontinue the development of the game.

At Eurogamer, Philip Oliver added:

“Producing video games is a risky business. Development costs are high and time scales long. The public naturally buy things that they have heard of, therefore it removes a great deal of risk to produce games based on popular licenses. Unfortunately it means less creative freedom for us producing the game, and ultimately the game’s success is based more on the license than the game itself. Titan A.E. did not do well at the US box office, and that effected everyone involved in spin-off’s from the movie. It’s a great shame that the American public didn’t buy into Titan A.E. ; I believe lack of marketing had a great deal to do with it. It was a good film, and this sets back the whole movie industry in attempting to create SGI animated sci-fi movies, which ultimately could have been great, as well as a good source of material for the games business.”

Some years later, the playable demo of the game leaked on the internet, and a PSX demo CD is also available for purchase on Ebay.

Thanks to Matt for the contribution!

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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RoboCop [GBA – Cancelled]

RoboCop, also known as RoboCop: The Future of Law Enforcement, is a cancelled side-scroller action game published by Titus Interactive and developed by Planet Interactive Development in 2002, exclusively for the GBA. It was based on the eponymous movie franchise.

Everything began in June 1999, when IGN revealed that Titus had acquired the licence in order to make a game:

Titus is on one hell of a license acquisition. Superman, Top Gun… and now put RoboCop on that list. That’s right, Titus now has the rights to bring the robotic cop of New Detroit to consoles. Currently, Titus will not announce officially which consoles its RoboCop game will be brought to, but the license includes all systems (…)

The Game Boy Advance version was first mentionned in July 2001 as we can read on French website Jeuxvideo.com:

While we recently announced the return of Alex Murphy for an adaptation of the famous film RoboCop on PS2, Virgin Interactive and Titus do not seem decided to make a one-shot but on the contrary, it is a real licence exploitation that we should attend. The title not only planned on PS2, it should also land on GBC and GBA. The games in question could be released by the end of the year (…)

Further details were again shared by Jeuxvideo.com in May 2002:

Titus has just announced the adaptation of the arcade game RoboCop on GBA in a title named RoboCop: The Future of Law Enforcement scheduled for October 2002. As you can imagine, it will be based on the famous science fiction film and on this occasion the players will get into the armor of police officer Murphy. On the gameplay side, we are told it will be a side-scrolling shoot’em up which should have no less than 7 levels and 14 sub-levels with 25 different types of enemies to face.

However, the game totally vanished after this announcement, was never mentionned again and, of course, wasn’t released in October 2002. No details to this day were shared about why it was canceled, but speculation can be made. Alongside this GBA version, it is worth mentionning that the other games planned for various systems had a lot of trouble. The GBC version was released somewhere in the end of 2001, only in Western Europe, and was met with negative reception.

The First-Person Shooter version went into a much more troubled development, it was first announced in 1999 when the licence was bought by Titus with apparently the implication of Xatrix Entertainment for the design:

Currently, Titus will not announce officially which consoles its RoboCop game will be brought to, but the license includes all systems, including PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Nintendo 64.
We have heard, however, that Xatrix, the developers of the upcoming PC first-person shooter Kingpin, will be handling the game’s design. What type of game will it be? A first person shooter, of course.
Don’t expect the game to be released until late 2000.

But the development dragged on and on, it was re-announced in April 2001, this time developed internally at Titus, and, first, only planned for the PS2 before also being developed for the Xbox and the GameCube. Then, Titus decided to cancel PS2 and GameCube versions and only focused on the Xbox. It is possible that the GBA version was dropped as well during this time of the development. After missing several scheduled dates, the game was released on Xbox somewhere in the second half of the 2003 year and was negatively panned by the critics. Oddly enough, the PS2 version was eventually released around 2003-2004 only in Europe, and the GameCube one released exclusively in Japan in 2004.

Another speculation about the cancellation of the GBA version was that its developer, Planet Interactive Development, disappeared somewhere in 2002-2003.

The whole source code of the game was finally leaked in January 2022.

After years of silence, the license returned briefly in 2014 with an adaptation of the reboot on iOS. It is finally for this year that the cybercop of Detroit should return in the world of video game with RoboCop: Rogue City, developed by Teyon and planned for September 2023.

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Superman: The New Adventures [Playstation – Cancelled]

Superman: The New Adventures, also simply known as Superman, is a cancelled action game published by Titus Interactive and developed by BlueSky Software from 1998 to 2000, for the Playstation. It was based on the animated TV show Superman: The Animated Series, itself based on the DC Comics‘ character Superman.

Initially, the game was supposed to be a port of the infamous Nintendo 64 game. However, over the years, it is known that the development of Superman 64 was plagued by constraints between Titus Interactive and the game’s licensors DC Comics and Warner Bros. For those unfamiliar with this story, you can read everything here.

Thus, BlueSky Software made the decision to recreate the game from scratch for the Playstation version, ultimately making a totally different game instead of adaptating the work done by Titus.

According to Playstation Museum, the game was rebooted around 1999, apparently due to the Columbine shooting:

After about a year of development, Superman was again re-designed. In April of 1999, the Columbine shooting happened and was a big blow to the industry as the media were using video games as a contributing factor for the shootings. Scuttlebutt has it that Titus suddenly changed the game from fighting Lex Luthor’s henchman to fighting robots. Supposedly the developer was not allowed to have shootings of human beings anymore or realistic looking weapons in the game. This changed a lot of what the gameplay was going to be into a more switch pulling, puzzle based game which was very different from the animated show and the N64 version.

Set to be released for June 2000, the title was ultimately canceled when the licence had expired preventing Titus to secure it again:

Unfortunately the license from Warner Brothers had expired. Essentially, Superman continued to be developed with no assistance from DC comics or Warner Brothers. The plan was to surprise everybody with a finished product. After almost 2 years of development, Superman reached a milestone: it received approval for release from Sony (…) but by  the time the game was completed, Titus was unable to secure the license. Superman for the PlayStation was officially laid to rest.

For its part, Eric Caen, founder and CEO of Titus Interactive, simply explained for Playboy Magazine:

“Sales were large, so we didn’t lose money on Nintendo 64 or Game Boy,” Caen said. “But Warner Bros. and Sony blocked the PSX version, and that was a heartbreaker. It was 90% completed and we had a half million units in back order.”

In December 2020, a complete build of the game was released on the web.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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Fireteam Rogue [SNES/MegaDrive, Genesis – Cancelled]

Fireteam Rogue is a canceled sci-fi action-adventure game published and developed by Accolade Inc. from 1993 to 1995 for the Super NES and the Genesis/Megadrive. The project was very ambitious for its time, as Accolade planned to launch alongside the game a comic book serie, with also discussion for action figure toys and a TV show.

Next information that will follow are from SNESCentral which was one of the first website to share many details as possible about this title. With a budget of 2,000,000 US $, this project was plagued by mismanagement that ultimately led to its cancellation:

Fireteam Rogue’s cancellation is probably due to having too much ambition. The people marketing the game claimed it would have 100 hours of gameplay, and that the characters would be larger than in most other action games. Personality conflicts and poor management due to this goal seem to have taken their toll, as stated by Russell Borogove (Bornschlegel):

“The project had a lot of problems in development. We spent a lot more time developing ridiculous data compression schemes to fit all the levels into the game, when we should have cut a couple of enemies and a handful of levels in order to get it done. There were also some personality conflicts that culminated with the producer of the project quitting when we were at beta. Shortly after that, the head of product development at Accolade asked us if we thought we should continue the project or not. It was unclear to me how much more work it was going to take to finish it and if the game was going to be good enough to compete in the market by the time we actually got it out, and I advised that we should shut it down. I don’t remember what the others said.”

The late Betty Cunningham on her website claims the game was complete. And it may well have been close to being finished. By the sounds of things, as development dragged on, it was increasingly clear it would not have been released. As artist Scott Ruggels recalls:

“Both of the game projects (Fireteam Rogue and the unreleased Genesis game, Cybernauts: The Next Breed) were helmed by John Skeel. I don’t know what happened to him after Accolade, but after the 2 million dollar budget for the game was spent, with about 750,000 spent on promotional materials, including a 6 foot tall roll of plastic with a life sized image of the main character computer generated within, and the prototype, that was, in all honesty, not very much fun to play, the game was cancelled, along with a lot of others soon after the new management took over, (…)”

The media give differing times for the ultimate cancellation. Gamepro, in its April 1995 issue states it was cancelled, coinciding with Warner Music Group buying a share in the company. Nintendo Power kept it in its upcoming releases section until the August 1995 issue. Ultimately, a long development cycle can never be good for a game.

Two different prototypes exist and their source codes are both available on the web. The first prototype is apparently in early alpha and might be dated from 1994. It was leaked somewhere around 2006-2007 and is pretty incomplete and glitchy. A much later prototype was acquired in 2010 by Evan G., founder and owner of SNESCentral and is dated from 1995, although it is not clear from which month:

This later prototype of Fireteam Rogue was acquired by me in June 2010. The seller worked at a company called IMN Control. They were looking into publishing games to package with their controllers, and I guess by April 1995 (the letter that came with the prototype was dated April 6, 1995), Accolade was hoping to get another company to publish the game. The seller said that he did not feel the game would be complete in a reasonable amount of time to bother investing.

In addition to the prototype, there were some marketing materials and a three page FAQ. The FAQ explains the different levels, characters and goal of the game. There is a date of December 12, 1994 on the header of the FAQ. The package included a poster/information sheet that probably was used at the 1995 Winter CES. The poster has an expected March 1995 release date. The prototype itself came on four chips, with a date of “1/16” on it, which I assume means January 16, 1995. I guess that despite the fact that the prototype was sent in April 1995, either development had ceased, or they did not feel like burning a newer copy.

This prototype appeared to be more complete and less glitchy with the addition of Mode 7 levels and a password feature.

On his own article, Evan G. concluded:

Fireteam Rogue is definitely a game that had promise. It had an intriguing plot, excellent character artwork and a promising gameplay system. The Shadowblade level in particular shows the scope of what the levels may have entailed. The shooter levels play quite well and compare favourably with many similarly styled shooters for the SNES.

That being said, the two alpha ROM images available show a game that is not close to completion. Though I was told development may have extended all the way to 1996, the evidence seems to indicate that it was leading towards demise in early 1995. In particular, the statement in Gamepro in April 1995 and the fact that they were trying to find another company to publish the game show that its fate was decided by then. If the later alpha that I have is what was shown at the 1995 Winter CES (which I assume, considering the date on the prototype, and the included CES-style advertisement sheet), it would have had an underwhelming response. For instance, despite the impressive size and animation frames of the character sprites, the animation was not smooth, and led to unresponsive controls. The level designs are poor, and lack the key items to proceed through the stages. The graphics themselves don’t look bad, though they have a limited palette. The promised linking of the levels into a single story was not finished in the game.

The lesson of Fireteam Rogue is that focusing on hype and story before the creation of solid level design and gameplay can sink a game. The back-story of Fireteam Rogue rivals most contemporary RPGs, and the initial gameplay ideas could have rivalled Super Metroid. Instead, a development cycle mired by poor management and delays made this just another footnote in the history of the 16-bit era.

In October 1996, Accolade Inc. released a DOS game called Eradicator in which three different characters are playable. Those characters shares many similarities with the 4 main characters of Fireteam Rogue.

Thanks to Evan G. from SNESCentral!

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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