‘Superman: Man of Steel’ was the last known working title of an open world action game Factor 5 were working on for Brash Entertainment, which was being based around the legendary DC comics superhero license, Superman. It was planned to be made for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. Its initial codename was ‘Blue Steel’.
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Black Sun was a concept for a new third person shooter / action game set in the space, that was in development by The Collective Studios in 2003. When in 2005 The Collective merged with Backbone Entertainment, BlackSun vanished without traces. The game was cancelled for unknow reasons, but probably they did not find a publisher interested in the project.
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At the Lost Levels Forums, GDRI has posted an interesting link to a japanese blog, where we can find some scans with screenshots of Devil Buster, a cancelled action / platform game inspired by Megami Tensei, that was in development for Mega Drive / Genesis at SIMS Studios. In the same topic Kid Fenris and kaboro posted some more screens from the game from other magazines. Props to them!
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Career Criminal is an action game that was in development at Midway Studios Austin (formerly Inevitable Entertainment) for the XBOX 360 and PS3, but later cancelled because it was too risky economically. It seems that the game would have been about stealing jewels / other precious stuff and it was set in a sandbox world. According to Marshall Womack who was Senior Environment Artist at Midway, this project was:
A “Heist” game, where the player would perform various heists around the city of Chicago. These heists required some intel and reconisience before the job in order to pull off the perfect crime.
Sadly the studio closed its doors in December 2008, laying off the entire local workforce as part of a larger, company-wide, action.
As we can read on Kotaku, the president of Midway explained that: “The Career Criminal title was a large, ambitious, open-world project. Midway management recognizes that ambitious games need extensive resources and can require lengthy development cycles with much iteration. We are willing to invest in the long run and we need to continue developing new intellectual properties. But all of our projects have to demonstrate a likelihood of success and profitability. The resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile for the Career Criminal project were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success.”
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Momma Can I Mow The Lawn? was a video game which started off in development for formats such as the PlayStation 2, but after the developer Warthog Games was purchased by Tiger Telematics to produce titles for the Gizmondo handheld console, it became a Gizmondo exclusive. Tiger Telematics went bankrupt in February 2006, and the status of this game is publicly unknown.
An article from GamesAsylum.com reads: “It’s a driving title in which the vehicle of choice is a ride-on lawn mower. Why? Because you’ve found a machine which can convert grass into fuel which you can get money for. There are various places to mow, and various things trying to stop you, including gnomes which come alive at night.” [Infos from Wikipedia]
Thanks to Gamepopper101 for the contribution!
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