Before being closed down by THQ, Big Huge Games were working on a simulation / adventure game for the Wii, that was know as “God The Game”. It was going to be a mix between Black & White, Animal Crossing, Little King’s Story and Zelda.. at least from the few informations and concept arts leaked from the project. The game was cancelled in late 2008 when THQ ran into financial difficulties.
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In May 2009, Factor 5’s american studio was closed down, because (as we can read from the official F5’s website) “obstacles created by the sudden bankrupcy of Brash Entertainment for the continuation of operations have turned out too great to overcome in the current economic climate”. The projects that were still in development should have been moved to the german studio, but it’s currently unknow if they will be able to complete them or if those games are going to be cancelled.
2 unannounced Wii games were in development at Factor’s 5 as we can read from an interesting article over at GoneIsGone, one of which was a flight simulation game. From the few 3D models available from this “Flight Project” it seems that we would have been able to fly all over the world with different aeroplanes and space-crafts (probably an easter egg from previous F5’s Star Wars titles). We can speculate that this prototype was developed from the concept of the – never released – F5’s Pilotwings for the GameCube and created with the Wii Lair Engine.
On December 2009, ShockingAlberto from the NeoGAF forum, posted some more assets from this project. One of the images has a different graphic style from the other assets, with a more cartoony / stylized characters. We can speculate that at some point in the development, Factor 5 decided to change the style of the game to appeal more to casuals and families.
It would be really nice to play a new flight simulation developed by F5 and we really hope that they could be able to finish and release this project.
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Robert Seddon has made us to notice about a page on jathys.zophar.net in which there is a collection of images that were found in the Harvest Moon (SNES) code thanks to the HM Editor, but that were never used in the game. As Jathys wrote in that page, those images could have been used with the credits in the beta version of the game.
As ace.dark has made us to notice, in the Youtube Channel of BowserEnemy there is an interesting series of videos from various debug rooms that were found in the GameCube version of Animal Crossing! In these beta worlds there are even some unused and weird objects, like flying boxes, baskets on a pole and beta villagers!
Thanks a lot to ace.dark for the contribution and props to BowserEnemy for the find!
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