In the August issues of British publications Sega Power and Mean Machines Sega, three different prototype versions of Earthworm Jim 2 for the Mega Drive were previewed. Each of them have some minor yet interesting changes compared to the final product, including a lot of material cut from the game.
HMS Carnage (later renamed to Dreadnought / Dreadnoughts and internally know as Dread0) is a cancelled Victorian steam-punk shooter (with strategy elements) set on the red planet of Mars, that was in development for almost 3 years by the Tribe team at Ocean Software. It was an ambitious project, but only a small playable demo and detailed FMV were finished before Infogrames acquired Ocean in 1998 and decided to kill it some months later.
It seems that the game concept was somehow similar to Warhawk, released in 2007 for the Playstation 3, in which the player is able to use ground and air vehicles, turrets and on-foot weapons to kill their enemies and complete the mission objectives.
HMS Carnage was mainly a PC-CDROM game and the PSX / Saturn ports were an afterthought: the console versions would have been very different with more action and less strategy.
At the time Ocean had a reputation for producing low quality movie tie-ins but with the much-hyped arrival of CDROM as a gaming format they wanted to develop some really ground breaking games. Ocean rebranded their internal development department as “Tribe”, invested a lot of money, hired a lot of new talent and asked everyone to come up with amazing original concepts huge enough to fill a CDROM.
HMS Carnage was one of the winning concepts, Silver was another (released 4 years later) and the third was a point ‘n click adventure with Hanna-Barbera characters, called “Zoiks” which was also cancelled.
The game kept its “HMS Carnage” title throughout most of the development, while “Dreadnought” was a name thought up by the marketing department towards the end (the development team didn’t much like it). Probably they though it was a more sellable title for a shooter.
Sadly the name-change was not enough to save the game. When Infogrames bought Ocean and review Dreadnought, too much work and money were still needed to complete the project: they thought that it could have been an economic failure and decided to cancel the development. After the cancellation, part of the Tribe team went to work at Psygnosis.
A preview for HMS Carnage was published in Edge magazine issue 32 (1996), if you are able to scan those pages, please let us know!
Thanks a lot to Maria Ingold, Matt Wood, Julian Holtom for their help in preserving media and info from their lost project!
Thanks to Robert Seddon and Celine for the magazines scans!
Images:
Videos:
Tommy Thunder was a third person shooter in development for the Nintendo 64 (and later for the PSX too) from Player 1 studios, but it was never released and we never got many informations about it. In November 2007, herpetic.adventures on the LostLevels forum posted an interesting story about a misterious file: “[…] about 10 years ago I was poking around the Player1 website looking for info on when Robotron 64 was coming out. Just for the hell of it, I clicked the “Press Info” link. Which turned out to be an anonymous FTP. Woo. Poked around a bit, and amongst directories of PSX assets, I found robo64.zip and tommy64.zip.” Inside the zipped file, there was what it looks like an early prototype of Tommy Thunder 64 and so, thanks to herpetic.adventures, we finally have some screens from the game to look at! You can read more info about his find in the Lost Levels Forum and check this article on NES World, where you can read some quotes from Tommy Thunder’s developers:
What you have is an early N64 Prototype of Tommy Thunder. The game got signed by ASC games and switched to PlayStation. We made it pretty far into production before ASC Games ran out of money and were forced to cancel the project.
Thanks to Vaettur for the logo!
Images:
Videos:
ODT, Or Die Trying, is a video game created by Psygnosis for the PlayStation and PC. Its style of gameplay is a 3D action adventure, with some RPG elements. Playing as 1 of 4 characters, your goal is to explore the “Forbidden Zone” to look for gas canisters to reinflate your balloon, which had crashed on the roof of a mysterious tower. Along the way you solve puzzles, battle monsters, and so on. A N64 version was completed but never released, though it has somehow been leaked online. [Info from Wikipedia]
In 2020 PIKO Interactive have announced that they have acquired the rights to the game, which includes the unreleased Nintendo 64 version.
Thanks to Henrique Resende, Vaettur and Vitas Varnas for the contribution!
Images:
Video:
It’s not often that current generation beta games fall into the hands of the ‘public’. So I was quite excited when I got the chance to play with a beta of Gears of War for the Xbox 360. The game’s size (as in, harddrive space), is quite small, so I’m unsure just how far the differences ago (as it may be audio languages or similar, I have no idea). But even in this late beta, some differences show themselves.