“Set 20 years after the movies, Gremlins allows you to play as either Gizmo or Stripe. The plot is centred around the idea that the town of Kingston Falls has gathered to pay belated respect to Gizmo and his owner Billy for saving the town over two decades ago. That night however, Gizmo gets splashed with water that causes him to spew out hoards of Gremlins. Which, obviously, you must track down and kill so the party can continue. Just pray that somebody doesn’t use this plot for a Gremlins 3 movie.Rather than creating a standard platform game, developers LSP have included a team-management element – similar to the one found in last year’s Conflict Desert Storm. You can control your troops using the trigger buttons, and also give them orders. There are eleven areas to explore including a bank and a school, each of which is filled with Gremlins dressed up as policemen, mafia types and so on.” [Cancelled]
“Johnny Whatever is a computer game by Warthog Texas. It started off in development for formats such as the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox, but after the developers were purchased by Tiger Telematics to produce titles for the Gizmondo handheld console, it became Gizmondo exclusive. As Tiger Telematics went bankrupt in February 2006, the status of the title is currently unknown.
The following is an excerpt from a GamesAsylum.com news article, dated 20 July 2004: The Queen has been imprisoned in a vat of mustard, and the only person who can save the day is guitar hero Johnny Whatever. That’s the premise of Johnny Whatever, one of three titles recently announced by Warthog. You attack your enemies, Robo-Bobbies, using your guitar, Nancy. As far as we can gather, the facia buttons fire off chords, and licensed songs form combos, with artists including The Troggs, The White Stripes and The Ramones.” – [Info from Wikipedia]
Munch’s Oddysee was originally intended to be exclusive for the PlayStation 2, however this version was cancelled to make the game exclusively for the Xbox, taking advantage of increased graphical capabilities. However, there were many different features that didn’t make it into the final version of the game. The differences are listed below:
Sligs were originally able to climb ladders.
Abe was able to hide in the shadows like in the previous games.
Sligs smoked cigarettes.
There was a giant hamster wheel on which the Mudokons ran to power the machines in the facility.
Sligs were able to beat up Mudokon workers like in the previous games.
Abe could toss Sligs out of the window, smashing the glass, and making the Slig fall to his death from a great height.
The Recycler was to have an LCD screen chart for how much meat and fat there was in the chopped up character and to also show how much of it was useful.
Mudokon natives could grow trees by chanting.
Mudokon workers wielded chain-saws for chopping down trees.
Flying helicopters, probably similar to the Flying Sligs.
A scene of a few Mudokons struggling to walk in the wind. In the same video it then showed a scene with an army of marching Sligs. The marching scene was kept in the game, but as a poor quality movie. The sligs are also marching the opposite way, which can be noted in one of the levels.
A flying helicopter dropped a SoulStorm Brew vending machine which lands on a Mudokon. The vending machine then fired SoulStorm Brew cans at another Mudokon that knocked him out. The last can landed into the Mudokon’s mouth, forcing him to drink it.
Creatures called Meetles were meant to appear in this game.
DenSen (meaning ‘electric wire’ in Japanese) was one of the first titles ever announced in the late ‘90s by Sony for their new PlayStation 2 and scheduled to be released in spring 2000, but in the end it vanished without any official statement. The project was in development internally by SCEJ and it looked like a really original game.
A little school girl would walk around and ride on electricity power wires with a coat hanger, to explore a floating, surreal Japanese town, in which along with traditional houses and streets we can notice a huge housewife dancing with her bag on a flying island. From the only video ever released on a demo CD published along with Japanese PlayStation 2 magazine PLUS (October 1999) we can see that players would have been able to follow branching directions that would have taken the game’s protagonist to different parts of the city, sprinting while hanging on power wires, somehow similar to grinding on wires in games like Jet Set Radio, or the most recent skyhooks in Bioshock Infinite.
The main designer behind DenSen was Kiyoshi Sakai, a name that will probably remain unknown by most gamers, but that could seem vaguely familiar to some people that enjoyed such weird games as Umihara Kawase, as he is also the creator of this crazy platformer series. Starting from 1994 Umihara Kawase was published with a cult following on different consoles such as the SNES, PlayStation, Nintendo DS, PSP, Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita, but most of these titles were never released outside of Japan. The music played in the Densen demo video is one of the tracks from the original Super Nintendo version of Umihara.
By knowing how the Umihara Kawase series is played, we can assume that Kiyoshi Sakai would have offered something similar in DenSen, with the school girl that would have had to reach the ending of the level in the fasted and craziest way possible, using hanging on power wires instead of the grappling hook.
In an interview with Sakai by Gosokkyu, they asked about DenSen to its creator that answered:
“Densen is a title we planned while I was working at SCEJ. However, before we had spent the adequate time organizing all our ideas, it was pushed forward and announced. As a result, it ended up failing. It was an SCEJ title, so I don’t know whether they have any plans to bring it back or not.”
Even if Densen was never released on the PlayStation 2, its weird premise influenced one of the strangest yet fun games of the “128 bit” generation: Katamari Damacy. Keita Takahashi (creator of Katamari) remembers that while working at Namco he saw that same DenSen video and it blown its mind:
“The PS2 was released in Japan around the time I joined Namco, and there was a Sony launch game that I was excited about called Densen, but which got cancelled. In that game, you used coat hangers to slide along an electricity cable like a zip line, which I thought was a wonderful idea, because it’s a twist on something you’d see in everyday life. I realized that the world around me could be in a game, and that had an effect on Katamari Damacy.”
An interview with Sakai about Densen was published in a Japanese book and thanks to Zammataro’s translation we have some more details:
The game’s protagonist is an office lady named Yoshizawa Kyoko
The game is supposed to be a “dream sequence” of her escaping from the bore of her ordinary life.
Each level was supposed to be her waking up from her daydream and having to run off to work.
The game’s mechanics had the player unlocking new areas by powering up certain devices using power lines with her attacks to get through.
Enemies and such are also supposed to be a representation of the protagonist frustrations in real life (here Sakai points at the bag lady model in the demo video, which he claims is the protagonist’s mother).
Surprisingly, it was supposed to have end bosses, all related with the “frustration relief” theme, some of the proposals was her pet dog, her boyfriend, etc… They were supposed to be defeated using or activating the environment’s gimmicks.
According to Sakai, the game was complete to “3%”, essentially most of the concept stayed on the drawing board.
As of September 2015, Kiyoshi Sakai is still working on videogames at Agatsuma Entertainment and their latest games were Code of Princess (3DS) and Sayonara Umihara Kawase (3DS and PS Vita).
Knights is a cancelled platform / action game that was in development in 2002 / 2003 by Lost Boys Games, planned to be published by Swing! Entertainment. The game was canned in late 2003 because Lost Boys Games were sold to Media Republic and renamed Guerrilla Games, when they started to work on their Killzone series for Sony. In this comical adventure game, your intrepid knight faced dangers by using environment where his lacking swordplay skills failed him — the game was designed to heavily utilize next-gen physics for its platforming gameplay and puzzle solutions. It’s interesting to know that Knights was originally started as a multiplayer brawler for Dreamcast and PC by Digital Infinity, but that version was canned when DI were merged with Lost Boys in late 1999.
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