Spearhead is a cancelled action / puzzle game that was in development by Scavenger for the Sega Saturn. There are not many info available on the project, but it seems that players would had take control of a “sphere suit” to explore 7 levels / mazes in the same vein as Marble Madness / Spindizzy Worlds / Super Monkey Ball. Sadly Scavenger had to close down in 1997 for economic issues and most of their games were never released.
Thanks to Rod_Wod for the scan!
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Ape Escape is an action game developed by Sony Japan Studio for the original PlayStation in 1999. Thanks to Devonjames10, we are able to take a look at a Pizza Hut Demo, that has some beta differences as noted in the video. If someone could find some other beta screens or videos, please let us know!
Thanks to Devonjames10 for the contribution
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Agent is a cancelled action / sandbox style game that was in development in 2003 by Rockstar San Diego / Angel Studios, for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. There are not many info available on the project, as it was never officially announced, but we can assume that it was going to be somehow similar to the GTA series. In the end the game was never finished for unknown reasons, but it’s possible that Rockstar San Diego had to shift resources to finish Red Dead Revolver. Only few screens and a video from an ealry prototype / tech demo are saved in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.
A new project also called Agent is now in development at Rockstar North for the Playstation 3, but we are not sure if the 2 games are somehow related. As we can read in Wikipedia, Agent by Rockstar Nord will be set in the world of the late 1970s and it will “take players on a paranoid journey into the world of counter-intelligence, espionage, and political assassinations”.
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Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) is an action coop game that was developed by Capcom and released for the Wii in 2009 (Japan) and 2010 (USA and Europe). As we can read in Wikipedia, the game was originally planned to be a PlayStation 3 title, but due to high development costs for that console Capcom instead decided to develop it for the Wii. Thanks to Monster Hunter Wikia, we can see many concept artworks from the official Hunter Encyclopedia 3, that show early versions of the MH3 monsters and various unused enemies (that may be revived for a possible MH3G expansion).
Beta Royal Ludroth:
Final Royal Ludroth:
Beta Barioth:
Final Barioth:
Check the gallery below for more concepts!
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Terminus is a cancelled action adventure / shooter game that was in development by Scavenger Inc for the Sega Saturn, Playstation and PC in 1996. As they wrote in their press release, the project was meant “to give Tomb Raider a run for it’s money” but sadly it was already too late, as the company ran out of money and Terminus had to be canned.
The few screenshots preserved in the gallery below show a great graphic engine for its time, that used NURBS / voxel-like system, as we can read in an article from Gamasutra (wrote by a former Scavenger developer):
[…] Soon thereafter we were asked to develop our own game. That provided me with the incentive to figure out how to represent characters in a game better. We knew we wanted at least ten or more characters on the screen simultaneously, but all the low-resolution polygonal characters we had seen just didn’t cut it. So I decided to keep pursuing a solution based on what I had been working on for X-Men (32X), hoping that I’d come up with something that would eventually yield better results.
At first I flirted with a voxel-like solution, and developed a character system which was shown at E3 in 1996 in a game called Terminus. This system allowed a player to see characters from any angle rotating around one axis, which solved a basic problem inherent to sprite-based systems. Still, you couldn’t see the character from any angle, and while everybody liked the look of the “sprite from any angle” solution, many people wanted to get a closer look at the characters’ faces. This caused the whole voxel idea to fall apart.
In 1997 / 1998, Scavenger went bankrupt and all their unfinished projects vanished with them. The team behind Terminus (internally known as Team Fetus) was then hired at Shiny Entertainment and their game was resurrected somehow, evolving into Messiah.
Thanks a lot to Mike Damien for its help in preserving some info and concept arts from this lost project!
Thanks to Celine for the contributions! Scans from GameFan 4-2 and EDGE 34
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