Promethean Designs

Picassio [Cancelled – PS2, GameCube, Dreamcast]

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Picassio was a stealth / thief game that was in development at Promethean Designs, in which the player would have had to steal artworks  to “win” a bet with another thief. The project had a long development cycle: it started as a Dreamcast game, then it was postponed and passed through PS2 and GameCube. In all that time the only playable build that was made was a very basic one, and is the one  that you can see in the video below: basically the character creeping about and some very basic AI. Most of the gameplay ideas did not get implemented at all. It seems that they started the game with a man protagonist in mind, but in later screens we can see a woman as the main character, so it could have been changed to appeal more to the young public.

The project got radically changed halfway through development when the company boss saw the then newly released Shenmue and basically decided to copy it. Picassio then turned into a half adventure, half stealth type game but didn’t get any further than some character/level designs before getting canned. The company fell into severe financial difficulty and employees weren’t being paid for months. Subsequently they all left to work elsewhere and Promethean Designs went bust.

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Videos:

Picassio Beta Trailer

 

Wild Water World Championships [N64 – Cancelled]

The Nintendo 64 has a good number of racing game, with the most various set of environments. However, from Wave Race 64 to Hydro Thunder, fans of the genre certainly felt the lack of more boat-racing game. In 1999 Promethean Designs and Interplay finally decided to satisfy all those requests and started to work on Wild Water World Championships. It was meant to be an arcade racing game similar to Mario Kart, with emphasis on the multiplayer mode.

There are just few tiny screens available and we don’t know how much work went into this game: Wild Water World Championships was soon cancelled for the Nintendo 64, but Promethean Designs continued the development  for the Playstation, Dreamcast and PC, chancing the name into “Renegade Racers”.

Sadly, even the Dreamcast version was cancelled shortly after. In 2000, Renegade Racers for the PC and PSX was released: the game received low ratings and it was soon forgotten … we can just wonder if the original Nintendo 64 project could have been better.

There was another cancelled water racing game titled “Wildwaters” that was planned for the Nintendo 64, but it should not be confused with this one as Wildwaters was developed by Looking Glass Studios.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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