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Tomorrow Never Dies [Beta – Playstation]

Tomorrow Never Dies was developed by Black Ops and then published in 1999 by Electronic Arts. On release, it was immediately compared to Goldeneye on the N64. One of the main criticisms was the lack of multiplayer, with only 10 single player missions making up the game. Yet, in the game’s content, there is an image of the beta multiplayer loading screen, so there were plans for it at some point, but abandoned before release.

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One of the loading screens also shows a level set on the HMS Devonshire, which was in the movie but cut from the game.

There is speculation that other unused beta content may have survived from an earlier, cancelled game called Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues:

The original VHS release of Tomorrow Never Dies featured a brief trailer with Desmond Llewelyn which highlighted a game that would “start where the film ends.” Footage shows bond skiing, scuba diving and driving in third person and on a first person shooting mission. The game was to come out on Playstation and PC in the fall of 1998 and was being made by MGM Interactive, not EA; EA was not involved in Bond until November of that year.

A Tomorrow Never Dies game was finally released on November 16th 1999, distributed by EA, but with notably differences from the 1998 attempt. The game was a third person shooter with the scuba diving level nowhere to be found. But perhaps the most glaring difference was the fact that the story now followed the plot of the film, not the continuation that had been promised.

A level in the game sees Bond skiing down a mountain and killing a Japanese terrorist named Sotoshi Isagura (who had featured very briefly in the film), while on another stage Bond has a driving mission in Switzerland. These were not from the film and may have survived from the ‘continuation’ story.

Article by Edward Kirk, source: Wikipedia 

LA Noire [Beta / Cut Content – PS3 / Xbox 360]

LA Noire is a third person action / investigation game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar in 2011. In an interview with Brendan McNamara, we can read that the game was going to have a desk where you would have to deal with burglaries and fraud – the desk was known as Bunko and Burglary. The entire desk had about eleven cases, all of which were cut due to the fact that the cases couldn’t fit on entire blue ray disk. Quoting McNamara from another article:

“We had a Bunko and Burglary desk – bunko is fraud and burglary is just people robbing houses and stuff – we had eleven full cases for that, which we wrote and did the design for to a certain extent – we even did the art for them too, but it just got to a point where we were never going to fit it on one Blu-ray,”

Evidence of the Burglary desk can be found in the game, such as at the beginning of the homicide desk, where the captain of homicide greets Cole Phelps after he earned a promotion from burglary. It’s also implied during the case Manifest Destiny that Harold Caldwell was Cole’s partner for that desk. Dialog implies that Harold Caldwell knows Cole Phelps – again implying that burglary was going too planned for LA Noire.

Finally, there was also a type of Mini-game (that was also cut) where the player could have made a captain angry. The player and assigned partner would have to complete certain crimes (car chases, shootings, etc) in order to get another case from the captain. Quoting the article

 “There was a kind of system where if you failed a case your captain would scream at you and you’d go out and do hot car chases or smaller robberies and muggings and all that kind of stuff in the world”

“You’d have to do enough of them to get to a point where you get offered another case, but as I said that got cut because I thought it was too much of a distraction.”

If there is any concept art from the cut desk, please share it here so we can add it to the article!

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Firearm [SNES – Cancelled]

Firearm is a cancelled 2d action game developed by Malibu Interactive which  was planned to be released for Snes and Genesis. Nothing much is known about it, apart that it was based on the eponymous comic. In 2010 what it looks to be a test build of Firearm was uploaded on the internet. This version includes only two stages and it is barely playable. It seems that the game was dropped very early.

Scans by snescentral.com.

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