Argonaut Games

Havoc (King Arthur’s world) [SNES – Beta]

King Arthur’s World is a 1993 side-scrolling strategy game for the Super NES. It was developed by Argonaut Games and published by Jaleco. In July 2009, Carnivol released an early beta the game throught the SNES Central website: the demo was called “Havoc” and there’s a playable level with almost the same gameplay as the final version, a different control scheme, some changes in the graphic and the HUD. For more info and to download the beta, check the Havoc page on SNES Central!

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Creature Shock [Atari Jaguar – Cancelled?]

Creature Shock is one of the games noted on the (back)cover box of the Jaguar CD attachment. The game was developed by Argonaut Games and released on 3DO and PC in 1994 and ported to the Philips CD-i, Sega Saturn and PlayStation in 1996.

As noted by Ross Sillifant:

I’ve ‘spoken to’ Alexander Holland-Ex-Argonaught-YES they had a Jag CD dev.System, but as Jez San told EDGE in an interview, Argonaught NEVER did ANY Jaguar games as system was too big a commercial risk.

I interviewed Darryl Still Atari UK PR at the time.Atari UK WANTED CREATURE SHOCK, but could’nt PIN Jez down, and COULD NOT AFFORD to code game themselves-So Atari were NEVER working on it.

I also spoke to Mike Fulton, Atari UK, he did all the Jag.dev.tools. He converted some generic FMV code from the game to a video format Jag CD could read, to see how it handled the data transfer rate, but that was all. No game coding by Atari, ever.

Darryl Still (Ex-Atari UK told me Atari WANTED the game, but could’nt pin Jez down) and Mike Fullton, Ex-Atari told: “I seem to remember we wanted to get Creature Shock going for Jaguar, but I don’t recall that it ever got anywhere, with the possible exception of maybe having converted some video footage to play on Jaguar.   And it’s possible we did that ourselves from assets they sent us, using our generic video player code.”

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EXO [PS2 – Cancelled]

EXO is a cancelled FPS that was in development by Particle Systems / Infogrames for the Playstation 2. It was going to be released in 2002, but during the development something went wrong and the project was canned. It’s possible that EXO was axed when Particle System was aquired by Argonaut and became Argonaut Sheffield. The studio was officially closed down in october 2004.

In the original press release we can read some features of the game:

Tactical combat throughout 18 diverse indoor and outdoor locations;

Intense combat against 14 distinct enemy types with multiple variations, each demonstrating advanced artificial intelligence and the ability to learn;

The story unfolds across the whole game with cinematic cut-scenes and through 12 intelligent, individual team members with their own hopes, fears, and motivations

Physics-based character animation and a new photometric graphic engine show unparalleled levels of realism of characters and their surroundings

You can find a nice gallery of artworks realized for this project at Gar HJ’s Website!

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Orchid [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

Orchid was an Action Adventure / Beat ’em Up that was in development by Argonaut Games and would have been published by Namco for the original Xbox and  Playstation 2. The project started with a cell shaded  graphic design and the gameplay was pretty nice from what we can see in the videos below, but two months before the game was cancelled the developers were asked to make it look more “realistic”. The whole team worked a lot and tried their best to change the game, but unfortunatly in the end Orchid was never released.

Thanks a lot to Franck for the contribution!

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