shoot ’em up

River Raid [SNES – Cancelled]

River Raid: The Mission of No Return (aka River Raid 3) is a cancelled shoot ’em up for the Super Nintendo, based on the original River Raid released in 1982 by Activision for the Atari 2600. The game was going to be published by Activision but it was later cancelled and only few screens remain preserved in the gallery below. Celine was able to find some of these images in Banzzai magazine #14 and Super Power #13.

The source code of River Raid SNES was found in 2001 by an user of the Atari Age forum:

I can tell you, that what I have of River Raid SNES, is mainly a source code dump from August of ’93. You’d have to recompile it in order to view it. I had one of my programmers do so just we could figure out what exactly we have on the floppy.

Some other info were found by Zwackery from the Atari Age Forum, in VideoGames magazine (vol. V, no. 11, Nov 1993). As we can read from the VGM article, “River Raid: The Mission of No Return”  was shown at the summer CES  1991 in Chicago, along with the cancelled Kaboom:  The Mad Bomber Returns.

It seems that “both got killed because the developers couldn’t push the SNES boundaires with either one” as noted by Klove in the Atari Age Forum.

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ResQ [MD/G – Cancelled]

ResQ is a cancelled 2D shooter / action game that was in development by Tempest Software for the Genesis / Mega Drive. The project was almost finished when the publisher, Psygnosis, decided to pulled it out: even if ResQ was never officially released, a rom of the game was leaked online and can be easily found through Google.

The look and feel of the game seem taken from an Amiga project, probably because the team was inspired by the Bitmap Brothers graphic style back then. Other inspirations were games such as R-Type (for the ship) C64 version of Turrican, Super Ghosts and Goblins (for the centurion) Starwing/Starfox (for the 3D bonus game).

As a former graphic designer of Tempest Software wrote:

The Game was programmed on 486 PC’s by Bill Pullan and Pete, while  Jason used Deluxe Paint II and III on an Amiga 1200 with RAM upgrade for Graphics and Animation. Bill actually worked on an Amiga title before RESQ, “Bill’s Tomato Game“.

Thanks to Jason and Celine for the contributions!

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Nuclear Rush [Sega VR – Unreleased]

Nuclear Rush is an unreleased shooter that was in development in 1993 for the Sega VR, the canned “virtual reality” accessory planned for the Mega Drive / Genesis. Four games were apparently developed for the system, each using 16 Mb cartridges that were to be bundled with the headset. One of these was Nuclear Rush, in which the players were able to fly with an hovercraft to fight in a futuristic war.

Thanks to Sega Forever we can read the original Sega VR press release that was published in Sega Visions magazine, August/September 1993:

From the moment you strap on the headset, you know that your gaming life will never be the same again. The world you see through the twin eye-pieces of the virtual reality (VR) headset responds as if it were another world, one you can explore by moving around without leaving your chair. […]

You are playing Nuclear Rush, the game that will be bundled with Sega VR, Sega’s new virtual reality headset. […]

Welcome to the year 2032. Get ready for a cataclysmic trek into a post-nuclear gold rush, where low-level nuclear waste is bartered as an energy source. You are posing as a nuclear pirate, piloting a hovercraft through radioactive wastelands guarded by heavily armed robots and drones.

As Iron Hammer, it’s possible that Nuclear Rush was playable even without the VR accessory. From an interview with Kevin McGrath at Sega 1 6, it seems that Nuclear Rush was completed before the Sega VR was cancelled:

My first project, called Nuclear Rush was to design and code one of the games that was going to be released with the SEGA VR Headset. It was a simple 3D shoot-em-up kind of game, but with the VR Headset it became an intriguing experience. We had concerns about creating nausea for the player, which could happen if the graphics are just slightly out of sync with the actual movement of the players head. Anyway, I spent a year on this project, and although SEGA paid us in full and we completed everything, the hardware never made it past prototype stage.

Thanks to Celine for the scan! (found in GamePower #21). You can also see Nuclear Rush in motion from the video below (thanks to  Grooveraider YT channel!).

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nuclear-rush-sega-vr

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Aftershock [Sega 32X – Cancelled]

Aftershock is a cancelled shoot ’em up that was in development by Sega Midwest for the 32X. A short video (just a couple of seconds) of the game was seen in the episode #70 of the ROX TV Show, when they visited the SM studio. As we can read from a GDRI interview with Jim Reichert, former Sega Midwest designer, the project was canned because of economic problems:

JR: Aftershock got beyond the proof of concept stage, and we were developing the game when I left. I remember that Aftershock got rave reviews as a product pitch at SOA, but by that time, Sega Midwest had pissed away so much money (with little ROI [return on investment]) that nobody trusted them with SOA cash — and Sega itself was totally floundering (32X?!?). It was too bad because that game actually had some legs, and the whole studio was excited about it — and I was the lead designer. I still have all the videos and game assets associated with it — I even have a cartridge with the prototype on it. We had a professional cartooner design all the characters for the game, and the images were completely awesome.

[…]

JR: Essentially, it was Jungle Strike set in a post-apocalyptic world where you could fly, drive, and cycle around.

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Nuclear Strike [PSX/PC – Beta]

Nuclear Strike is a multi-directional shooter developed by Electronic Arts and released in 1997 for the PlayStation and PC. DCodes7 has noticed that there are some data files named “E3*” in the game’s disk, that are probably releated to a beta demo that could have been used in a past E3 to show Nuclear Strike to the press. Luckyly this beta demo can be freely played by typing the code “LIGHTNING” in.

The beta level is unfinished, the mission and its terrain is based off the second level of Nuclear Strike, but with lots of incomplete edits. More than half of  the area is empty and has no live action FMV’s of its own. When completing all objectives you will hear a message saying “Thank you for flying strike air, we know that you have a choice of many games to play and we appreciate your time to play us.

Also note that the “LIGHTNING” code for the beta level never appears in Nuclear Strikes campaign and the only way to know of its existence is to look up the code on the net. You can see this unfinished level in the videos below.

Thanks to DCodes7 for the contribution!

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