third person shooter

Playstation 2 (PS2), PSP, Sony

Shitkickers [PSP, PS2 – Cancelled]

monokoma
04-08-2020
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Shitkickers is a cancelled action shooter that was pitched by David Jaffe on PSP and PS2, possibly when he was working with Incognito Entertainment o Eat Sleep Play. Just as with his Twisted Metal series, Shitkickers would have heavily used vehicle-combat during missions, with the high concept being “Max Payne set in the deep South of USA“.

While the game was never officially announced and possible not greenlighted by Sony, Jaffe shared a couple of pages from their original pitch on Twitter:

“Shitkickers gives the Nascar fan their own action hero. Shitkickers is not goofy, silly ‘dumb rednck” humor, it actually glamorizes the Red State culture. Think a hard edges Dukes of Hazzard or Smokey And The Bandit. Game would have country music and southern rock soundtrack with country stars even starring in some of the smaller NPC roles (Willie Nelson, Faith Hill, Dolly Parton, etc.). Kind of like what the Urban Rap games do with the rap star (i.e. 50 Cent’s BulletProof).

Be cool to get the actual licenses for specific trucks, guns, stores and such that are indigenous to the Red State Culture. Game itself is a shooter and driving game (lots of vehicles to use in the missions). A streaming environment would be great, but I don’t know if this will work on the PSP. In an ideal world we’d be making this on PS2 as it has the more casual audience at this point and the casuals would probably dig this more than hardcore, elitist gamers who may make fun of the subject matter.

That said, if our hero is just bad ass in every way (think The Rock in Walking Tall) we could be fine on any platform. I see this as a hard T-rating, something dads and their sons can play together, it’s rough and tough and down and dirty, but it’s not nasty and dark and violent. Hell, maybe we should just get The Rock and scan him and do the 50 Cent thing? Right now, it’s just a vibe and a setting, we would have to work to really make the third person shooter gameplay feel fresh and to give it some unique ideas. But that doesn’t worry me so much.

Overall, I think it’s a fresh, fun theme that may very well be one of the last remaining cultural avenues that games have not exploited. Could this be the action game for those droves who bought ATV OffRoad Fury?”

As far as we know these 2 pages are the only remaining document proving the existence of this lost project and the team may have not started any prototype before it was rejected.

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Others, PC / MAC

Hell or High Water [PC – Cancelled / Prototype]

monokoma
04-08-2020
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Hell or High Water is a cancelled jet-boat shooter that was in development by Wild Child Studios for PC. You can imagine it somehow like a mission-based Wave Race set in different levels from all around the world, where you had to shoot down enemies and collect key-items to complete your objectives.

As we can read in the prototype description:

“Hell or High Water fits players in a heavily armed military-type jet-boat. You have to use your best skills to outmaneuver and destroy AI-controlled opponents with your arsenal of rockets and machine-gun. The game consists of several episodes in various parts of the world with different mission objectives. For example, in the episode at Amazon River your goal is to collect dynamite and use it to mine and blow up a river dam, while in the Nord episode you have to find and destroy a crashed plane prototype and pick up the black-box. The whole game is an intense race against time in the world of water, fire and explosions!”

The team worked on this prototype to test gameplay using Driver-Inter‘s proprietary engines, but in the end the project was cancelled, possibly because they did not find a publisher interested in funding it. Wild Child Studios were also working on another water based game titled “Extreme Wakeboarding”, which was also canned in 2002.

Thanks to Mihapsx for the contribution!

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Others, PC / MAC

Wingblade (Bootprint Entertainment) [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
17-07-2020
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Wingblade is a cancelled flying-action arena shooter that was in development by Bootprint Entertainment around 1998 – 1999, planned to be published on PC by their parent company GT Interactive. The team was formed by former ORIGIN Systems (Wing Commander, Ultima, System Shock) developers, lead by producer Rod Nakamoto who wanted to create new, ambitious video games.

As we can read on Gamespot:

“Rod Nakamoto recently left Origin Systems to found a wholly owned development studio for GT Interactive. It’s called Bootprint Entertainment and should make its mark on the industry in the coming years. […] Like GT’s other wholly owned studio, CaveDog, Bootprint is being given free reign to develop the games it wants. Nakamoto says he and his teams want to create products that are not only competitive in terms of graphics, but also in terms of AI and gameplay. But, Roan says, “the main thrust of our games is going to be multiplayer, we’ll still have single-player .”

But the near future for Bootprint is all about multiplayer games. Not so much persistent worlds, like Ultima Online, but persistent gaming environments like battle.net. Roan hopes to create games that will grow an online community. […] Bootprint also sees a future in hybrid games. Nakamoto says that they will create hybrids, “with an emphasis on action and a combination of strategy and RPGs. They make for unique products.”

Bootprint is starting out with a technology team, which will soon start work on the engine for its first two games, and two product teams. One team is working on an action/RPG, while the other is working on an action game that could have strategy elements.”

Unfortunately Wingblade was never officially announced by Bootprint Entertainment nor GT Interactive, so details about its gameplay and settings are scarce. By reading that Gamespot article and by looking at the available footage we may speculate it was going to be an online multiplayer shooter in which players could freely fly around fantasy levels to find and kill their opponents.

Keep in mind Wingblade was in development during the “Online FPS craze” of the late ‘90s – early ‘00s, when cult titles such as Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament were some of the most played games on PC. For sure it looked great for 1999 and it could have been a fun multiplayer game if only released.

Unfortunately in 1999 GT Interactive posted a net loss of $254 million, with their game sales failing to meet expectations. In November Infogrames Entertainment bought 70% of GT Interactive, but many of their internal teams had to be closed: after just a couple of years, Bootprint Entertainment was no more. And all of their games in development (Wing Blade, Viscera and Wrath) were canned and lost forever.

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Playstation, Sony

Mars Adventure (Sony Imagesoft) [Playstation – Cancelled]

monokoma
29-05-2020
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Mars Adventure (AKA “Saturn3054: The Titan Rescue”) is a cancelled action game that was in development around 1994 – 1995 by Sony Imagesoft, planned to be one of their first in-house projects for the original PlayStation. In 1994 Playstation hardware was still a prototype: all of the documentation was in Japanese and 3D console games were something new and hard to develop. Mars Adventure was an eleven-person team project and their first 3D game: unfortunately they were not able to complete it.

Gameplay was inspired by classic Choplifter and it would have been a first / third person, 360° flying game: you can imagine it somehow similar to Descent or G-Police, but its main mission was saving people from aliens. As we can read on Kyle Rode’s website:

“Since I was the only actual game player on the team, I quickly took control of the game design task, and I started to write up the game design document.  At this point, the original Doom was the only game on the market that had any similarity to a 3D game, and it was actually a 2-1/2 D game, at that.  Later, during development, Descent came out, and it was  similar to what we were trying to accomplish.

The basic premise of “Mars…” was “Choplifter/(Fort Apocalypse)” on Mars or Titan or whatever.  The player flew a spaceship around a space colony on Mars, and would rescue the people from the alien invaders.  The spaceship would have a close proximity teleporter, which would suck them up into the ship’s cargo hold.  The close proximity was the reason why the space marines couldn’t just do it from the mothership ala Star Trek.

I liked the idea of rescuing people as the main focus of the game play, instead of shooting up baddies. The act of rescuing would require that the ship stay motionless for a short period of time, while the transport occurred.  This would open the player up to danger from the aliens.  Also, when shooting up an environment, if you weren’t careful, there was always the chance that you might kill some good guys in addition to the aliens.

Unfortunately, the Playstation development kits that we received from Sony corporate in Japan, were a couple of months late, and the documentation was in Japanese.  We even received the dev kits after third-party developers outside of Sony.  Also, the Japanese documentation made them pretty worthless.”

By looking at prototype footage from the game it would have been quite amazing for its time, with huge levels where you could fly in every direction and fluid 3D graphics.

Thanks to RareAlone for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Syndicate Reboot (EA Black Box) [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3]

monokoma
03-03-2020
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Around 2005 Canadian team EA Black Box was working on a Syndicate reboot (8 years before their 2012 reboot of the series), to be published for the 7th generation of consoles (Xbox 360, Playstation 3). While the original Syndicate was a real-time strategy game, this new project could have been a more linear action oriented third person shooter, a popular genre on console at the time.

Unfortunately EA never officially announced this new Syndicate, so details about the game are basically zero. What we know is this Syndicate reboot was cancelled not long after: the team tried to convert it into an even more fast-action shooter featuring a female protagonist, but in the end even this new incarnation was canned. Part of the same team later worked on Gunhead, another interesting, cancelled third person adventure featuring a gun-headed protagonist.

Black Box were moved to more profitable projects such as Need for Speed, NBA Street and Skate, before part of the team was laid-off by EA Canada in 2012, when the studio was renamed into Quicklime Games to focus on social gaming and free-to-play.

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