Santa Cruz Games

How I Spent My Summer Vacation [DS PC – Cancelled]

How I Spent My Summer Vacation is a cancelled “horror” action game that was in development by Santa Cruz Games for the Nintendo DS and PC. As we can read on Gamasutra, players would have took the role of a little girl named Joanne, armed with a chainsaw to take down zombies that invaded her summer place.

It’s like a survival horror game for kids,” said Neuse. “This is the one we usually show when we’re pitching new game ideas. I think it’s every developer’s dream to eventually be doing our own ideas. […]”

Sadly only a playable demo was created before “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” was canned, maybe because they did not find any publisher interested in the project. Some screens are archived in the gallery below, to preserve the existence of this lost game.

Thanks to Gerro for the contribution!

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Chalice [DS – Cancelled]

Chalice is a cancelled shoot ’em up that was in development in 2008 for the Nintendo DS by Santa Cruz Games. The team created a playable prototype, but it seems that they were not able to find a publisher interested in this project, so it had to be canned. Chalice had a graphic style that could somehow remind of REZ for the Dreamcast, but it was played as a 2D side-scroller shooter.

Thanks to SCI for the contribution!

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Stackers (Stackpack) [GameCube, PC – Prototype]

Stackers / Stackpack is an unreleased platform / puzzle game that was in development by Santa Cruz Games for the GameCube and PC. This project was probably an evolution of their Pickles prototype, in which the player had to stack various characters on each other, to resolve the levels. The Pickles demo was shown at the Game Connection 2006 as wrote in an article published on Gamasutra by Lost Level’s Frank Cifaldi, but sadly Stackers and Pickles remained only tech demos, as Santa Cruz Games was not able to put more time and money into them.

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Pickles [GC/PC – Prototype]

Pickles is a prototype for a platform / adventure game that was developed by Santa Cruz Games in 2005 / 2006 for the GameCube and PC. They created a playable demo for the game running on their own engine, but it’s currently unknown if they ever tried to pitch the project to a publisher. The Pickles demo was shown at the Game Connection 2006 as wrote in an article published on Gamasutra by Lost Level‘s Frank Cifaldi:

“So the soldier monkeys have bombs, and the elephant shoots peanuts like a machine gun and stuff,” explained Alex Neuse, Project Manager for Santa Cruz Games. “The idea is that you’re stacking, and as you stack your teeter tower is toppling. This is just a tech demo, but if we could really devote some time and money into it, it could be really awesome.”

The Pickles demo looked really interesting, but it never evolved into a full game.

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