Beta & Cancelled capcom Videogames

Maximo: the Dark Knight is a cancelled “Adults Only” (AO) game pitch that was considered by Capcom USA to develop as a spiritual sequel to the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series. After Capcom of Japan shown their Ghosts ‘n Goblins N64 prototype to the press in 1996 (a game that was never released), a year later Capcom USA conceived their own pitch for Maximo on the Nintendo 64. As revealed by William (Bill) Anderson (Senior Game Designer for Maximo) in an interview published in our book “Video Games You Will Never Play”:

“Bill: When I came to Capcom to develop Maximo the N64 was still the hot market, but Capcom USA only had one development team at the time and they were all working on Final Fight Revenge, which I was told would wrap up soon. Well soon doesn’t mean the same thing in Japan I guess for FFR had a producer over here from Japan and he wasn’t in any great hurry to finish the game. So it took a really long time to finally get a start date for the production and by then the N64 wasn’t king anymore and I was asked to change all of my designs to Playstation.”

Final Fight Revenge was available in the arcades in mid 1999, but Capcom USA already started their new Playstation 2 pitch for Maximo: the Dark Knight in late 1998, to be able to start development before Sony’s second console would be released in March 2000. Their idea was to create an action game for adult gamers, with violent gameplay, realistic visuals and a mature storyline. To conceive a dark medieval fantasy setting suitable for their new game, David Siller (Creative Concept and Studio Director for Maximo) got in contact with Joe Pearson, writer and producer for such series as Roswell Conspiracies and Kong: The Animated Series. As written by Joe to Ross Sillifant:

“It all took place in 1998. This was a paid gig from Capcom who approached me through a contact via David Siller whom I had worked with on the first Crash game. At the time, Capcom was seriously considering doing a hard R-rated for violence and sex dark Maximo medieval fantasy game and they wanted me to write up a concept Bible and opening game cinematic/introduction.
This was a dream come true as I was a big fan of Michael Moorcock’s brilliant Elric book series and a real opportunity to delve into my own dark side and cut loose with some edgy over-the-top world building and scenarios. The result you can read for yourself. I think it’s pretty, horrifically successful in a dark fantasy way.
It wasn’t easy as I was in full production as the Show Runner on the 40 episode animated Roswell Conspiracies series, but it was such a rare opportunity to cut loose, I made the time over a long weekend to write it up. Well, Capcom paid me for it, and then shifted over to the G-rated mode for the game itself so I never got to write out the script scenarios for the sexed up “Princess reward levels”. Oh well, that’s entertainment.”

In this opening scene written by Joe for the undeveloped Maximo: the Dark Knight pitch we can read:

“FADE IN on a tortured landscape of jutting rocks and twisted trees. Flames burn from crevices torn in the barren earth. Smoke and fumes fill the screen. Distant, giant shapes can be dimly seen dwarfing the stunted trees. As the narrator speaks we slowly PUSH IN. The shapes emerge from the smoke—a deformed, one eyed cyclops with huge, misshapen hands and a second, tusked face embedded in its chest, a dead white giant worm, with the multiple legs and clawed tail of an earwig and the face of a baby, a jet black female Centaur with red burning eyes and hair, a sickly green, multi-limbed octopus with the face of a beatific, painted geisha (each tentacle ends in a lamprey toothed mouth), and a hairy, spider-like creature with the head of a ravening wolf, etc. (go wild, use your imagination)
We move past the monsters to reveal Lilith on her titanic obsidian throne. She is supremely beautiful and terrifying. A giant, red skinned demoness, with black bat shaped wings and huge bull like horns (I’m picturing a beautiful female version of the Tim Curry character from “Legend”. Her lower legs and feet are goat-like. She caresses the head of a massive catlike creature with the spiked tail and armor of a stegosaurus. Piles of thousands of human skulls form pyramids on either side of her throne.”

The original draft script for Maximo: The Dark Knight’s prologue is preserved in here.

In the end Capcom USA sent their pitch for this adult-only Maximo to Capcom of Japan, that unfortunately rejected their idea. As told us by William:

“No, no prototype of a realistic Maximo was ever produced. Once we submitted the full game design document to Capcom Japan, along with the concept art we produced they pushed back and said that they wanted all of the realistic looking games to come out of Capcom Japan, so that’s when we had to change the look and feel of the game. It was our intent to make a gritty and dark game from the start, so we were a bit ticked off when our producer rep from Japan showed up with a first playable demo of Devil May Cry, for it had the look and feel of what we had originally proposed. Oh well, nonetheless we ended up with a game more successful than even Capcom Japan had expected, so much so that they asked us to convert the game to Japanese first, so they could do a big launch of the game in Japan, before here in the US.

Their second concept for a Ghosts ‘n Goblins’ spiritual sequel was Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, later released for Playstation 2 in December 2001. Maximo became a cult-classic for the console, but unfortunately the second episode “Maximo vs. Army of Zin” sold poorly and the third Maximo game had to be cancelled.

Thanks to Ross Sillifant for the contribution!

Game Boy, Nintendo

Dino Crisis [GameBoy Color – Cancelled]

LazyFace

09-03-2015

8 Comments

The original Dino Crisis was a widely popular survival horror (marketed as survival panic) game developed by Capcom and released on the original PlayStation in 1999. It was created by the same team that made the first Resident Evil game and contained many of the same tense elements but focused on more of an action feel.

A portable version of Dino Crisis was being developed for the Gameboy Color by British studio M4 Ltd, who had released Tasmanian Devil: Munching Madness and were due to release Jerry McGrath Supercross 2000. M4 stated that the game would not be complete until Q4 of 2000 but development had started early in the year, this was reported by IGN who spoke to the developers. M4 said that Dino Crisis for the GBC would be a top down adventure rather than how the original was, it would also be developed exclusively for the GBC by-passing any kind of black and white compatibility. Virgin interactive handled development for Capcom in the UK and so they were handling this game, there was no word on where it would be released. M4 Ltd version of Dino Crisis GBC was never released, but they developed top-down Resident Evil Gaiden, published by Capcom in 2001.

It seems that this unreleased version of Dino Crisis was used as a base to develop the released Resident Evil Gaiden. As we can read at NowGamer:

As I recall, we produced a very impressive demo for a GBC version of Dino Crisis. Resident Evil was already in development as an over-ambitious port from the PlayStation version. This was scrapped and Capcom asked us to do a bespoke game with our Dino Crisis engine.
Capcom had requested Virgin for a Dino Crisis demo, Virgin asked us to create it. It used the exploration mode and [similar] battle system as Gaiden would use.
It was playable. The dino sprites in exploration mode were large. I have entire backups of everything from M4, absolutely everything, but I’m in Brazil and the backups are in the UK.

This is not the only version of a GBC Dino Crisis that can be found on the web though, as on two separate Spanish websites Vandal and Dino Crisis Wiki the game was reported to be being developed by a different studio. This other cancelled game was said to be being developed by the now missing Fluid Studios another British developer who released games such as Top Gun: Firestorm (GB) and Army Men: Air Combat (GB and N64). This was also said to be being developed late 1999 early 2000, for the GBC.

There are a few more details for this version of the game though: it would not be a top down adventure but rather using static backgrounds and images accompanied by text sequences. Some presumed screenshots from Fluid Studios’ Dino Crisis seem to have been leaked online too, but we don’t know their source. These sites also report that the game was to be 7 maps with 100 rooms in total. There were to be four characters in the game Regina, Rick, Gail and Dr Kirk all who appeared in the original game on the PlayStation. Also it was said that there was going to be five types of dinosaur two unspecified with the others being the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptor and Pteranodon.

Images:

Update: While this article was being uploaded to the site I have been looking through documents that were released (you can find the design doc online) regarding the game that was in development by Fluid Studios. In this document it is revealed that what Fluid actually wanted to produce was a scaled down version of the original Dino Crisis, they wanted to keep all the original maps, plot-lines, dinosaurs and the look and feel of the original. This is quite a bold statement as the original was on the PlayStation 1 which is a more powerful system. Fluid were worried about the restrictive nature of the GBC especially in regards to the sprite size and how they would recreate the dinosaurs.

The story had a very brief background written about it, there was to be an undercover agent (Regina who had infiltrated the compound and was trying to capture Dr. Kirk and take him back to her government agency. Fluid also intended to have different game modes for this and it was said that they would have bonus missions if you had completed the game. This was said to contain three missions in which the player would have to kill a set amount of dinosaurs in a certain period of time.

Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Mega Man Universe [Cancelled – XBLA / PSN]

yota

23-02-2015

5 Comments

Mega Man Universe is a cancelled 2.5D platformer game that was being developed by Capcom for XBLA and PSN. It was officially announced on July 16, 2010 with a short video made by Iam8bit.

Its first gameplay video was unveiled at PAX 2010, showing three different levels and some of the available characters; the stand outs of which were “Bad Box Art Mega Man“, and a teaser for Ryu from Street Fighter. Arthur from Ghost n’ Goblins was planned to be playable too.

Six months later, Mega Man Universe was playable at TGS 2010, where its main features were introduced in more detail.

The same three stages from PAX, created only for demonstration purposes, appear here too; each one representing a different difficulty level (Easy, Normal and Hard).

Leaked, Nintendo, SNES

Demon’s Crest [Beta – SNES]

monokoma

07-11-2014

1 Comment

Demon’s Crest is a 2D action game developed by Capcom and originally published in 1994 for the Super Nintendo. As we can read on Wikipedia, this is the 3° game starring Firebrand (an enemy character from the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series), following Gargoyle’s Quest and Gargoyle’s Quest II. Thanks to Casey Strange we were able to note some minor beta differences in the some screens published in old magazines.

In the screenshot the earth gargoyle has a slightly different sprite. The color is a bit darker but it could be because of the magazine. The enemies in the first beta level were different as seen in this preview video of a sample Demon’s Crest demo for retailers.

There were two Demon’s Crest prototype sample cards on eBay and one japanese beta version was leaked some time ago, you can find the download in this nice anonymous Tumblr, thanks to Casey for the share! This ROM dump of the Japanese sample / beta game looks more like the final game compared to the video, but maybe with the help of our friends at TCRF it would be possible to find some interesting unused stuff hidden in the beta code.

In this beta you start the game with all 5 talismans and four of the crests. This is different compared to the final version. The game stops after the second battle with Arma in stage four and you are greeted with this screen.

Armageddon Potato noted:

After doing some comparisons there is a large chunk of blank data in the retail rom at the very begining (which was also dumped by a SUPERUFO apparently as it’s tagged in the header.) After that the prototype is indentical the final minus the size differences. I wouldn’t expect any changes in the prototype then. […]
I landed up getting a cleaner rom rip. One without the SUPERUFO header which may have been causing the blank space problem(since that makes no sense!) It does appear to have some differences, although they may be possibly minor. Once I get some solid free time I’m going to have to play though both the retail game, and the prototype. I need to know exactly where the game lock you from the later levels in the prototype, and possibly pictures/screenshots of where this happens.

If you notice more beta differences from Demon’s Crest, let us know in the comments below!

Thanks to Casey Strange and MicroChirp for the contributions!

Images:

Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Ghosts ‘n Goblins 64 [N64 – Cancelled]

Celine

23-06-2013

2 Comments

Ghosts ‘n Goblins 64 is a cancelled action game that was in development by Capcom for the N64. In November ’96 Capcom invited the press to check out their upcoming lineup for the next year. Among the games shown there was a new Ghosts ‘n Goblins game for Nintendo 64. From what Neil West (Next-Generation Magazine’s editor-at-large) described, we known that the project was still in a early state of development but it was already clear that Mario 64 was a big source of inspiration, as happened for many games in that period like Konami’s Goemon 64. After that event nothing more was shared with the public and the game was quietly cancelled by the publisher maybe because the N64 performance in the japanese market resulted relatively weak.

Scan from Edge issue 41.

Images: