Our reader Ceno has helped us to identify some previusly supposed cancelled games, that where released under different names: “Dawn Of Darkness” was released in Europe as “Last Rites” for MS-DOS PC. Thanks a lot to Ceno for these infos!
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Take the Bullet was a planned light gun video game for Sega Dreamcast from Red Lemon Studios. Unusually for its genre, it showed the character’s weapon on screen as in a first-person shooter, had an optional third-person view and was slated to have both online and split-screen multiplayer modes.
The game was originally announced for a Christmas 1999 release in Europe. This date was missed. As of March 2001, it was still planned for release, but never actually came out. It was never planned for release in North America. – [info from Wikipedia]
Thanks to Jenkins and eSPy for the contributions!
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Red Steel is a FPS published by Ubisoft for the Nintendo Wii, created by the Ubisoft Paris studio and released on November 19, 2006 in North America. Red Steel was one of the first Wii games to be developed by other studios outside of Nintendo. [Info from Wikipedia]
When the game was just a concept, it was know internally as “Project Katana” and Ubisoft started to work on a GameCube prototype, as the Wii Development Kits were still not available. Some screens from the Katana GameCube prototype build were somehow leaked thanks to Wombat on the Assembler Forum: “screenshots from the booting sequence of Project Katana ‘playing ground’. These were made prior E3 2006 and running on an standard GameCube devlopment kit, but offcource with the Wii-controller connected to it. This ‘playing ground’ was used by the makers to see how the wii-mote reacts and works.”
Additionally, some early concept arts from Project Katana can be seen in the gallery below: it’s possibile that some of those places were not used in the final game and even the protagonist’s character design seems a bit different from the final one. Also, there were some target renders released before the published game, that have a much more better graphic than the final one.
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This first person shooter, in the vein of Rainbow Six, was one of the first “Dolphin” tech demos that were shown before the console became the “GameCube”. It was made by Saffire, a development studio that worked on Rainbow Six for the Nintendo 64 and one of the first studios that started to work on GameCube games. Even if various RS titles were released for the GameCube, no one of them was ever made by Saffire and this video remains just an interesting concept that was never realized.
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Rare’s two N64 first-person shooters, GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, received strong acclaim from critics and players, and demand for another title in the Perfect Dark franchise was high. Development of Perfect Dark Zero began on the Nintendo GameCube. At the time, Nintendo had a 49% stake in Rare, making Rare a Nintendo second-party developer. The game made a small appearance at Spaceworld 2000, an event exclusive to Nintendo. But apart from the confirmation that it was in development, few official announcements were made. Perfect Dark Zero, along with several other Rare games, was intended to be finished in time for the Gamecube’s launch, but did not.
In September 2002, after losing a steady trickle of staff for two years (including many of their Goldeneye 007 team members, who went on to found Free Radical), Rare Ltd was purchased by Microsoft. Around the same time, Rare released several images of Joanna Dark, the protagonist of the Perfect Dark games. The “cartoony” style of these pictures incited speculation that the final game — then intended for the original Xbox — would employ a less realistic graphical style than the original game; possibly an anime like cel-shading technique, (RARE had hired UK Manga artist Wil Overton to work with them, after seeing an anime-like image of the Original Perfect Dark game he had created for the cover of N64 Magazine.)
Development of the title was later transferred to the Xbox 360. Perfect Dark Zero’s senior designer Chris Tilston (also one of the project leads for the game) later revealed that the Xbox version was “about twelve months away” from completion when the switch occurred.
In 2005, one of the rewards in the OurColony viral marketing campaign for Microsoft’s next Xbox video game console was an image of Joanna Dark. At the official unveiling of the Xbox 360 on May 12, 2005, it was revealed that Perfect Dark Zero would be a launch title for the new system in the fall of 2005. The game’s development has therefore spanned three platforms: the Nintendo GameCube, the Microsoft Xbox and the Xbox 360.” – [info from wikipedia]
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