Conan is a cancelled action game that was in development in 2006 by Planet Moon Studios for the PSP. There are not many info available on the project, it seems that they created a playable prototype to show to various publishers, but in the end they did not find one interested in the game. The development of Conan was stopped and only few screens remain in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.
Thanks to Mytia for the contribution!
Images:
Mega Man 8, known as Rockman 8: Metal Heroes in Japan, is the eighth installment in original Capcom’s Mega Man series, and was originally released in Japan on the Sony PlayStation on December 1996. The following year, Mega Man 8 saw a release on the Sega Saturn and was localized for both consoles in North America and the PlayStation in PAL regions. Director Hayato Kaji revealed that he initially designed Duo as robot created by the Mega Man 4 character Dr. Cossack. When it was decided that Duo would instead come from outerspace, his appearance changed but still retained remnants of Russian traits, such as his headware. [Info from Wikipedia]
Thanks to Proto1, we found out that MegaphilX uploaded an interesting video from a Mega Man 8 beta in his Youtube Channel.
Everything is practically unused in the footage. The background, the effects, no bolt item, Mega Man’s got a strange running animation and towards the end of the video, you can see early footage of the stage select screen. The bosses have not been made yet, so their Metools act as their temporary icons. Also, a sprite of Duo appears here as well, something that isn’t in the final at all.
– Completely unused BGM
– The background for the stage is unused and unfinished.
– Mega Man has an odd running animation. He’s very stiff in comparison to his final running animation
– His color when using the MegaBall is Green and Yellow instead of Pink and purple.
– Enemies appear at places they don’t usually in the final.
– Big yellow blocks have a blue streak through them. In final, they’re solid yellow.
– at one point in these videos, there’s an elevator lift moving downwards. In the final, elevators never go down, only up.
– No enemies in elevator portions.
– No hit detection with Whale Airship enemies.
– Bolt items weren’t implemented yet
– Beginning at 5:04 in this video, you can catch a quick glimpse at a work-in-progress stage select. Mettools represent stages under construction, and the Duo character is shown as the boss for the Island stage. Duo isn’t a boss in the Island stage, so perhaps he was in this particular build.
– Also at the stage select, Tengu Man’s mugshot appears on the top right column where Frost Man should be. In the final, he’s on the top left.
Thanks to Proto1 for the contribution!
Videos:
For comparision, here’s the final frost man stage:
Here’s an update showing the beta in more detail by DeGamer (aka Henger83)
Two more additional stages in this version seen above are covered here by JosephCollins
An even later beta build with many more differences can be seen in action here:
Elevator Action, produced by Taito, was an arcade game from the 1980s. While never becoming as famous as other games of the time, such as Pac-Man, Galaga or Space Invaders, it became a cult classic, often remembered for its espionage themes. Unfortunately, the franchise never really went anywhere. In 1994, an arcade sequel, Elevator Action II, was only ever released in Japan on the Sega Saturn, and in the US as a Dexter’s Laboratory game.
In 2008, however, Taito planned to revive the series by bringing out a new game on the Nintendo DS, which would have played more or less the same as the first two instalments. The original illustrator, James Harvey, was set to design all-new characters for the game, while ensuring that the classic feel of the original was upheld. Harvey says that he was asked to redesign the principal characters (three anti-terrorists), but to “keep one eye on the present and one eye on the past”. Soon after he submitted his designs, however, the game was scrapped for an unknown reason. Harvey’s characters have now appeared on the Internet, and an overview is provided below:
Kim Min Ji, a North Korean, is the first member of the team. She is armed with a laser pistol, which is charged from a tea kettle full of battery acid, which she can also hit people with. She wears a North Korean military uniform.
Brussels Tibia, the second member of the group, wears a black outfit, with a human skeleton drawn all over it. Harvey describes him as a “crazy white kid in a Halloween suit”. His special power would have been his lethal flying kick.
And, finally, Rakim Al Taff (whose name is a play on the original Elevator Action II character Jad the Taff) is a tough Muslim radical who dons a pink cap and pants, and would have had a running clothesline special move.
It is very unfortunate that this very promising revival never saw the light of day. We can only hope that Taito will one day re-open the file, and consider bringing this game to the public.
Information, and pictures of characters, were shared on Boing Boing.
Article by Franklint, thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
Images:
Video (from the original 1983 Elevator Action):
In 2006, Eurocom began working with Sony Computer Entertainment on a PlayStation 3 exclusive project titled The Protector. Development progressed far enough that voice recording sessions had already begun by 2007. However, the game was ultimately cancelled in early 2008. Because the project was never officially announced, very little information about its gameplay, story, or overall design has ever been publicly revealed.
Following the cancellation of The Protector, Eurocom continued developing several licensed and original titles between 2008 and 2009, including Quantum of Solace (PlayStation 2 version), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, G-Force, and the Wii-exclusive shooter Dead Space: Extraction, developed in collaboration with Electronic Arts.
Andrew Spinks, who worked on the storyboards and animations for The Protector, kindly shared his artwork and a series of screenshots with us along with some memories of this lost project:
“I was hired as a freelance storyboard artist by Eurocom to storyboard 3 key cutscenes for the demo version of “The Protector”, a planned PS3 Sony exclusive set for release early on in the PS3’s history. I eventually went to work in-house at the Eurocom studios in Derby and remember playing on the demonstration models of the PS3 which we have sent to us. I spent around 3 months working freelance before being hired by the company as a junior animator to animate the cameras in the cutscenes that I had storyboarded, using 3D Max. I completed two sets of storyboards before going to work in Derby and the first set took around 2 and a half months, they were quite detailed and essentially some of my best work at that time. A deadline was set to redraw the majority of the storyboards, I guess before submission to Sony, adding camera movements as a side directional element. I managed to fulfill this task in a short time span and the new storyboards became grittier and more visceral as a result. The parallels between this game, The Protector (2007), and The Last of Us (2009), has never really ever been addressed or hinted at before, but I do feel that Sony might have used some form of inspiration from this cancelled game that we were working on to help develop The Last of Us. I remember working with the design team when possible to make our central character, more beaten and world weary. I remember saying to people, “Make him older, give him lines of distinction, like Humphry Boggart.” And that the character model should always be alert and looking around instead of being static. When I saw the first trailer for The Last of Us, I can’t lie, I saw our game. The parallels are astounding. The central character of Joel is very much who and what we were developing and the Joel and Ellie dynamic was also present in The Protector. In The Protector, you played a hired-gun essentially who’s job was to rescue the American president’s children who had been kidnapped by a guerilla faction after a plane crash. And yes, there was a young girl character amongst those children who very much had a similar age and manner as Ellie.”
Images:
As we can read on Wikipedia, Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64 was originally going to be titled Conker’s Quest and was later titled Twelve Tales: Conker 64. Early beta screenshots suggested the game would feature cute characters and colorful settings. Rare had a long history of making games of this sort, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing, and at first Conker did not appear to be any different. However, Rare started to fear that the game would simply get lost in the platforming crowd, and critical mockery of “yet another cute platformer” caused the original game to be drastically overhauled.
The promotional videos and pictures from Electronic Entertainment Expo (at the time when the game was still called Twelve Tales) revealed objects and characters which have influenced the released game. Objects such as the flower and mushroom sprites were seen in the promotional video and a character closely resembling Buga the Knut was seen chasing Conker (who was wearing a knight’s helmet) in a promotional picture. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is considerably a far different game from the original plans despite the small influences it had on the release game.
Even if the differences with Conker’s Quest / Twelve Tales beta are more obvious, Cubivore10 noticed some little beta differences in the early Conker Bad Fur Day too.
Here we can see that with the exception of Conker the whole screenshot has different textures, maybe be even reused from Twelve tales. The barn (pink roof) looks like it might even be shaped differently. (beta at the top, final at the bottom)
This one’s a bit odd. The only time the fire imps appear in any cutscenes are during the Bat’s Tower chapter. From what little I can see of the background its the boiler room still, but I NEVER recall the fire imps acting like this (I play that chapter on a regular basis FYI) It seems like something has shot off smoking and a fire imp is freaking out. Whatever is on fire by him appears to be burnt. The imps do become grey when Conker urinates on them, however, they don’t shoot off like that.
At about 4:36 in the video below, there is the scene with the fire imps : it seems to be catching something in his mouth, whatever the smoking thing was.
This beta / unused cutscene was found still hidden in the final game by Goomther and ConkerGuru:
As wrote by Cubivore10:
This short scene was in an earlier trailer. I’m assuming, judging by the way it grows, you would have fought a giant Fire Imp as opposed to the Boiler at some point during development.
As wrote by Fuzzy, it’s quite short but in Goomther’s video it looks like the imp is eating another imp, but in the original it seems the imp is eating something like a burned rat.
Nothing much here, but unless he’s over more to the right than I recall, Birdy the scarecrow isn’t outside the bar.
Another minor detail, but in the final version of the game Gregg’s voice bubble is a dark gray color
The gray squirrel that Conker talks to is holding a walkie-talkie in the beta version (also the changed “tedizs” to “tediz”).
In the video below, at about 1:25 when Conker has to use his slingshot to open the vault, it doesn’t seem to be moving.
Also, Goomther found a weird / unfinished level in the game’s code, that could be an half-removed debug room! Check the video below for a look at this strange area. More unused models and development stuff were found by ConkerGuru in the game’s code (check his website for more!):
The tail of an very popular mouse pokémon. This tail was, according to an post on Chris Seavor’s twitter page, used for an cutscene they were forced to cut on nintendo’s request. When the cutscene played, the tail, obviously, would be placed on the back of the Pikachu model. Whatmore, Conker was also to interact with it during the scene, as there’s some unused animations remaining in the game of Conker sitting on his knees, and petting some creature.
Thanks to Cubivore10 and Goomther for the contributions!
Images (unused / beta models):
Videos: