Blizzard

Raiko (Blizzard + Flextech) [PC – Cancelled]

Raiko is a cancelled action RPG that was in development by Flextech between 1996 and 1998, planned to be published by Blizzard Entertainment for PC. The game was conceived as a “3D Diablo with samurai”. At the time Raiko was not officially announced by Blizzard, but its name was later shown in a list of cancelled games they talked about at DICE 2008. In 2017 former Flextech founder and developer Felix Kupis published a few screenshots of their Raiko prototype on Linkedin:

“Raiko was a Diablo style game with a 3D engine set in ancient Japan. Even though the game got cancelled for various reasons, we did manage to have a working 3D engine, RPG system and a level editor. I can still run the engine today almost 20 years later on windows 10. Here are some screenshots from March 1998.”

Just a year before we had the pleasure to interview Felix for our bookVideo Games You Will Never Play”, when he shared some of his memories working on Raiko:

“As a fan of Diablo style games and Asian folklore I wanted to make a game that was essentially a 3D Samurai Diablo. This was built on a 3D engine but was played from a similar view to Diablo. You could turn the camera around to see more of the environment and the game was coming along but got cut when Vivendi bought Blizzard.

Myself and my crew of a couple people that did the work on the game traveled down to E3 when it was held in Atlanta and set up a meeting with Alan Adham and Bill Roper on this game demo we made for Raiko. I got to know Alan Adham when I told him my story of basically being kicked out early from Westwood (I was leaving after finishing Red Alert) for wearing a Blizzard shirt.  At that time the heads of Westwood hated Blizzard for “stealing” their RTS ideas so after wearing the shirt to piss off my boss I got the boot early. Anyway I was a good in with Mr. Adham and got me the meeting at E3, it was actually the very last meeting of the show for Blizzard.  After looking at our demo I remember Alan and Bill Roper both had a huge smile on their face and told us this is the game we have been looking for.”

“After Raiko got cancelled, Blizzard kept all the rights to it so we were basically looking for a new project before we ran out of funding.  We pitched Disposable Heroes to a bunch of publishers including GT interactive, Atari, and some others.  Disposable Heroes was basically Halo way before Halo but nobody would give us the funding for the game before money ran out and we had to shut down Flextech.  I still have the original documents for Disposable Heroes, it’s really funny reading them now and looking at how close it was to Halo.”

Thanks to Robin for the contribution!

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Crixa [Cancelled – PC]

Dou you remember the Blizzard cancelled games list? Well two weeks ago I was searching on the internet and I found a lot of information about one of the games, Crixa that was in development by an indie game company called Qualia Games between 1995 and 1996. It was a 2D top-down spaceship shooter that was going to be published by Blizzard Entertaiment.

Here there is more information about this canceled project:

Post by Elian

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StarCraft 2 [PC – Beta]

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is a RTS developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released on July 2010 for PC and MAC. As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was announced on May 2007 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, but the development began in 2003, shortly after Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was released. According to Rob Pardo and Chris Sigaty, development for StarCraft II was put on hold for a year in 2005 due to the assistance needed for World of Warcraft. On February 2010, StarCraft 2 began closed beta testing, that was expected to last for 3–5 months.

Thanks to the beta, players were able to experience various changes during the development of the game, as posted by ABetaname and Zero7 in our U64 Forum.

Stuff from earlier builds such as cut units were found as leftovers in the beta.

soul hunters aren’t in now

phase cannons aren’t in now

tempests were changed back to carriers

no twilight archons, I believe anyway, I think they’re still normal archons though there is a twilight academy so maybe it’s an evolution/transformation

There has been a lot of other changes over the years that we can find from the Alpha version of the game. Such as the Thor.

“The Thor also originally required an SCV to construct, as opposed to being internally built from a structure. The idea behind this is the Thor was too large to be created from a Factory.”  It also had a different (obviously place holder) voice actor. Basically over the years the Thor kept getting smaller and smaller.

It seems that Blizzard planned on having the Corsair from Starcraft Broodwar in StarCraft 2. However only the voice clips exist of him, hidden in the game’s code.

Various beta voice clips of some units were on the old StarCraft 2 website can be listened below, thanks to Starcraft2units‘ Youtube Channel.

More videos that explain some interesting beta changes can be found in PsyStarcraft‘s Youtube Channel:

 

Shattered Nations [PC – Cancelled]

Shattered Nations is a cancelled sci-fi action / RTS game that was in development by Blizzard Entertainment. There is not much info on this lost project besides a teaser trailer in which we see a futuristic city and a flying helicopter. From the video description we can read that:

The game was set in a world which was at peace but one day fire rained down from the sky, in which people were forced to scavenge for food and technology. There was a 20 year nuclear winter which made the world into a vast wasteland. The player would have to search for technology and move your people around so that the civilization will thrive.

Rumors say that Shattered Nations evolved into Starcraft. In some issues of PC Champ (a Korean magazine from late 1995 to early 1996) derboo found a render image that shows one mech from Shattered Nations, but in a following issue, that same mech was described as the Goliath from Starcraft (The Goliath in the final game looks way different, though).

The original Starcraft was released in 1998, so it’s possible that in 3 years Blizzard decided to completely change Shattered Nations’ settings and story to create their popular RTS. It’s also possible that some of the Shattered Nations’ assets could have been reused in Starcraft. Sadly we don’t have any confirmation of this theory and even Blizzard refers to Shattered Nations as one of their cancelled games.

Thanks to derboo for the contribution!

Thanks to Jason for the english corrections!

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WarCraft Adventures [PC – Cancelled]

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WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was a dark comical point-and-click adventure computer game under development by Blizzard Entertainment that was set in the Warcraft universe, and cancelled before its release. American company Animation Magic was out-sourced due to their experience in classical two-dimensional animation to produce the twenty-two minutes of fully-animated sequences, the game’s artwork, the coding of the engine and the implementation of the sound effects. Blizzard then provided all the designs, the world backgrounds, sound recording and ensured storyline continuity. Four or five months after Blizzard had released