Zombie Studios

Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 [PC / Dreamcast – Cancelled]

Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025, formerly known as M.O.U.T. 2025, is a cancelled futuristic squad-based First-Person Shooter developed around 1999 to 2001 by Zombie Studios and published by Ripcord Games, for the PC and the Dreamcast. As the title suggest, it was set in 2025 where player took the role of a member  of the Military Operations on Urban Terrain, a special military team whose missions are related to counter-terrorism.

The game was first revealed in November 1999 by IGN, which, at that time, indicated that it was similar to Tribes:

We also learned last night at a Ripcord sponsored press event that Ripcord will be working closely with Zombie on future games based on the Spec Ops concept. Lou Viveros, President of Ripcord, told us about at least two Spec Ops-based projects in the works. (…) Shrapnel, will be a futuristic squad-based shooter similar to Tribes.

More was shared in April 2000:

In Ripcord and Zombie’s Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025, you become a member of the elite M.O.U.T. Force, the swiftest and surest weapon in our nation’s growing arsenal against the terrorist threat. The title, which in some ways looks to resemble Red Storm‘s Rainbow Six is a first person shooter in which you carry out various missions against our largest foes.

As the 2025 of the title would suggest, Shrapnel takes place in the near future, although the developers seem keen on stressing the near part. What the game gets from this setting is a slightly sci-fi atmosphere, but the real area of interest is in weapons technology. Placing the game just a bit ahead of the times allows for players to be on the receiving end of a realistic arsenal of advanced weaponry. We’re talking stuff that hasn’t even seen the light of day outside of some loon’s weapon-testing ground, including some items that are best classified as “deceptively deadly.”

In speaking with the game’s producer, we learned of a few examples. Imagine if you will, a grenade, only smarter. These grenades can be programmed to travel a certain distance then spontaneously explode, without even striking the ground. So, say a young man named Mike is actively campaigning for an upcoming presidential election, and while touring through New York City, he smells something fishy in the air. He scans his surroundings inently, and spotting what he believes to be a grenade launcher, he leaps behind a car in order to take cover. But you, the gunman, came prepared with your smart grenades. You get a readout on the distance from the gun to the car – about 50 feet, program the following grenade to explode after sixty feet of travel, aim the grenade at the window, and let her rip. The grenade launches towards the car, breaks through both windows, and explodes in mid air right behind Mike (don’t worry – he was into some bad, bad things). The initial blast may not fully get him in full impact, but the shrapnel does the job.

You’re going to need them as you take to your various missions, all of which are set in realistic cities and feature realistic terrorist threats. The game’s design and AI are being handled by real life counter terrorism experts, the very same guys you design the anti-terrorism training grounds used to prep America’s finest, so we can probably expect a realistic, and therefore tough experience. Thankfully, in addition to the above mentioned futuristic weapons, the video we’ve included below of the game points to the inclusion of laser sighting and sniper modes available on call, and we’ve also learned that you’ll have equipment that can triangulate the location of you and your buddies based on sound.

Fighting terrorism is a team effort, you won’t be alone in Shrapnel. We don’t have much in the way of detail on the game’s team aspect, with Ripcord having only told that we can expect the game’s included online mode to allow for up to eight players simultaneous. That’s all we know at the moment, other than the game’s making use of the Lith-Tech FPS engine.

Further details could be read on Gamespot in December 2000:

Just as in Ripcord’s other Spec Ops games, MOUT’s focus is on realism. The game is uncompromisingly realistic when it comes to inflicting and taking damage. Enemies can be felled with one bullet to the head, and team members are just as easily killed. The game will make you exercise your whole team and take full advantage of your MOUT tactics.

The game will feature many futuristic weapons that, while based on current military prototypes and designs, are completely fictional. Still, the technology in the game sounds very cool. Each member of your team will be wearing a combat helmet fitted with a special HUD capable of triangulating enemy positions based on data from other team members’ helmets. A well-placed team member can alert you to activity behind walls and can even help spot immediate threats. Additionally, the game will feature upgradeable weapons, such as grenade launchers that can be refitted with prototype grenade rounds.

One of the more interesting aspects of MOUT 2025 is its online capabilities. In conjunction with Ripcord’s pledge to make games that take advantage of Sega’s gaming network, MOUT 2025 will be Internet multiplayer compatible, featuring up to eight-player cooperative and deathmatch play.

MOUT 2025 is scheduled for an October release.

Still on Gamespot, the following month, we could read this:

The game essentially has two modes of play: a single-player, mission-based mode and an online, “every man for himself” battle for up to eight players.

A very small section of one of the game’s levels, in a nighttime setting, was playable at the E3 show. This urban area was cluttered with trash cans, elevators, and alleys. In terms of weapons, there wasn’t much variety. Perhaps because the game was presented in a limited setting, the only weapons that were readily available were a straight machine gun and a short-range rocket launcher. Also, the only real power-up was an ammo recharge. According to a Ripcord representative, however, several new weapons and power-ups will be added to the finished product.

Sadly, in March 2001, Ripcord took the decision to cancel some Dreamcast titles, following the restructuration of SEGA after the console didn’t do well in terms of selling units:

Lately, it’s been more of the ugly news of third parties canceling their Dreamcast games and now, Ripcord Games might join that list soon.

“We have put a hold on the further development of our Dreamcast games,” stated John Peterson, Executive Vice President of Ripcord Games. “While we believe the Dreamcast is a great system, SEGA’s new business direction [into the software business] has made us re-evaluate our current state.” Mr. Peterson wouldn’t go so far as to state the Ripcord Games for the Dreamcast – Legend of the Blade MastersGorka Morka, and Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 – were cancelled, but are pending publisher’s decision.

Ripcord Games definitely closed offices in April 2001, ruining the chances of Legend of the Blade Masters, Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 and Gorkamorka being released, at least, on PC.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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Rogue Warrior: Black Razor (Zombie Studios) [PC, Xbox 360, PS3 – Cancelled]

Rogue Warrior is a First-Person Shooter published by Bethesda Softworks and developed by Core Design (also known as Rebellion UK Derby, a subsidiary of Rebellion Developments), released on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2009. The game take place in 1986 during the Cold War, in which Richard Marcinko, a Navy SEAL, is sent on a mission into North Korea to disrupt ballistic missile launchers.

But before being released as such, the game was known as Rogue Warrior: Black Razor and was totally different from the final product following a rather disastrous development. Initially made by Zombie Studios, from 2005 until, at least, the first quarter of 2008, this title, planned by the time for a release around 2007-2008, already on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, took the form of a squad-based tactical First-Person Shooter/Third-Person Shooter, somewhat similar to the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise, set in present day North Korea, in which we played a team of four Navy SEALs, led by Richard Marcinko, attempting to infiltrate a submarine facility to get intelligence data on the country’s nuclear capabilities. Then, as a war between north and south is about to occur, escaping and navigating through enemy territory.

Using the Unreal Engine 3 (instead, in the end, Rebellion’s proprietary engine Asura), the team insisted a lot on the various possibilities of gameplay, whether it was the non-linearity of the level design, allowing to be able to play stealth or more run and gun, or to accomplish the different objectives in any order, as well as an emphasis on the online mode, whether doing the campaign in coop or the multiplayer mode allowing you to create different combinations of maps. Following its announcement in the end of the 2006 year, numerous media had the opportunity to see the game run. Thus, Gamespot wrote:

(…) The design team at Zombie felt that the “rails” approach favored in those games (so called because you’re basically restricted to a single path) doesn’t really capture the essence of SEAL combat. SEALs are the Navy’s elite commando units, and they’re usually dispatched in small teams to operate behind enemy lines and to capture this element of SEAL warfare Rogue Warrior will have fairly large levels for a first-person shooter. The idea is that you’ll be able to approach tactical situations in the manner that you determine.

For instance, in the example that we were shown, Marcinko’s SEAL team approached a North Korean ship-breaking yard. In this situation, there were three paths that the team could follow, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. One path might be more direct, but it also increases the odds of detection, while a safer option might offer a more roundabout path that takes longer to navigate. The idea is that you can tailor your tactics to fit your situation. The levels are big, but not gigantic, designed for tactical flexibility.

During your adventures behind enemy lines, you’ll encounter a wide variety of environments and foes. In the beginning, you’ll battle North Korean conscripts, but as you progress closer and closer to the front lines of the battlefield, you’ll encounter elite North Korean Special Forces, basically the equivalent of the SEAL team. These enemies promise to be intelligent. For instance, the bad guys will actually talk to each other on the radio, and that means if you neutralize a guard and his buddies start asking for him over the radio, you’re in trouble because they’re going to investigate why he disappeared.

The game is also going to be fairly flexible in how you play it. You can switch between first- or third-person views, depending on your preference. And you can also play the game as a team tactics game, where you give simple, context-sensitive commands to your teammates (for example, you can tell one to sneak up on a guard and knife him), or you can play it as more of a run-and-gun-style action game, where your teammates just follow you wherever you go. The really cool thing about the team mechanics is that the campaign supports cooperative gameplay, whereby other players can jump in and take over any of the other three slots in your team. And if anyone drops out, the AI will take over, so you don’t miss a beat.

As cool as this new cooperative mode sounds, the new tiling system for the competitive multiplayer is even more interesting. The developers explained that one of the problems with online action games is that the levels never change. Rogue Warrior addresses this by separating the map into three sections that can be mixed and matched to create hundreds of different maps. Up to 24 players, each side can select a map tile that it wants for its side of the map, while the middle tile is determined by the server. So if one side likes to snipe, it can choose a tile with long fields of fire for its section, but the other side can counter this by choosing a built-up tile for its section, thus negating the sniper’s fields of fire. The middle section is a bit of the wild card, as the server can randomly select it. Put it together, and you never know quite how each map will play out.

And CVG, for its part, told us:

“We wanted to do some different things in the tactical shooter space than what’s already being done. We wanted to do something more openended and less constrained,” explains Pete Hines as a vivid level swells onto the monitor, revealing a North Korean ship-breaker’s yard teeming with detail and enemy patrols.

It’s one of the campaign’s earliest levels, a recreation of the start of Richard and his team’s marathon undercover journey to get back across the border to safety after they’ve been stranded in North Korea at the start of the North/South conflict.

“We wanted to base the game on a licence that would give the game a sense of authenticity, so the things that you see are as realistic as possible,” explains Hines as Zombie producer Mark Long pans around the level. On the screen, Marcinko’s digital twin and three Spec Ops sidekicks stand knee-deep in water that looks so convincing, I’m already stripped off to my pants and inflating my arm bands: an urge quickly suppressed when Long lets off a burst from his silenced MP4 into the water. The bullets kick up spray and steam rises from the superheated silencer. “We’re also working with Richard to make sure that the weapons and equipment look and feel authentic,” continues Hines as Long leads his team out of the water towards a North Korean truck parked nearby.

In a further attempt to make Rogue Warrior look and feel as authentic as possible, Zombie are not only carefully recreating Marcinko’s exploits, but are also taking pains to ensure that the freeform battlefield you inhabit reacts as realistically as possible.

Whereas many shooters still utilise a simple vehicle damage model, Rogue Warrior’s regional approach to inflicting damage is set to infuse the game with a genuine sense of believability.

“We’ve created a destructible system that’s really interactive,” enthuses Long. “If you shoot a truck’s gas tank, it’s going to explode. If you shoot the bumper it won’t really do any damage. But if you shoot the engine enough, it’ll set alight and the fire will spread, eventually reaching the gas tank.”

Eager to prove his point, he lets off a flurry of bullets, which hammer into the truck’s front bumper causing it to shake until it falls to the ground with a clang. Moving his sights to the engine, Long lets rip again, this time igniting a small flame that licks hungrily at the truck, slowly devouring it until it reaches the petrol tank. Seconds later, the truck is blown into a thousand molten shards.

Visuals aside, perhaps Rogue Warrior’s most impressive attribute is its attempt to meld run-and-gun gameplay with open-ended squad-based combat, theoretically allowing you to approach each level as aggressively or as stealthily (or indeed, as tactically) as your cold heart desires.

“We wanted to go with something that was a departure from the genre’s current nondescript, over-stylised direction,” explains Long as he moves his team towards a cluster of nearby North Korean patrolmen with a single mouse click.

With the option to command each individual team member (each of which has the same set of abilities that you have), or to issue orders to your entire team, Rogue Warrior’s gameplay is looking flexible, clearly leaning towards the more open-ended approach adopted by the likes of Splinter Cell: Double Agent than more conventional, linear shooters.

But there’s little time for contemplation right now as Long’s eager to showcase both of these playing styles. First, he chooses a tactical, stealthy approach to the conundrum of taking out the guards. Leaving the rest of his squad behind cover, he slowly flanks a lone guard before slashing his throat.

Next he cycles through his collection of booby traps – remote, time and pressure bombs -and plants one on his victim’s uniformed corpse. The dead man’s radio crackles briefly as one of his fellow guards checks in on his status, but the enquiry is met by silence.

Alerted by their comrade’s lack of response, three nearby guards rush to check on him, kneeling low in apparent concern as they search for a pulse. Big mistake. Grasping the remote detonator switch, Long takes out all three men with a single press of a button without having to fire a single shot.

“This is a system that we’re calling ‘Lure Behaviour’,” beams Long. “Guards communicate with each other via radio and they’re going to be checking on each other so they’ll know if something bad has happened to someone on patrol. You can also place a booby trap on an alarm in order to take out any enemies that try to activate it.”

With the presentation coming to a close, it’s clear that Long is determined to go out with a bang by showcasing the game’s all-out action features. Selecting one of the many routes through the level, he leads his team towards a group of gargantuan rusting hulls, surrounded by pockets of enemies.

“There are a lot of different routes that you and your team can take through the levels,” says Long as he waits for a pair of North Korean soldiers to pass his hiding place. “The Artificial Intelligence is integral to this setup. It’s designed to react to you and your team regardless of where you are on the map. The A.I.’s communicate to each other, call for alarms and reinforcements, see you and hear you. Sometimes they’ll fight you, sometimes flank you, other times they might flee and regroup.”

As the ship-breaker’s yard is engulfed in a hail of lead, Long sends two of his men to flank the enemy soldiers, who instantly seek out cover. Short bursts of gunfire are exchanged, as each side preserves its limited supply of ammo. Enemies duck out from their hiding places, before diving back, but they’re soon overpowered with a few wellplaced grenades and a cunning flanking manoeuvre that they never see coming.

“We’re trying to give you a tactical shooter with tons of potential to play the way you want to play and we’re going to throw tons of curve-balls at you along the way,” says Long as the end of level cut-scene kicks in. In it, Marcinko and his team are left contemplating their predicament as the sheer extent of their task is revealed – the camera panning for miles over the North Korean countryside, over countless battlefields, all the way to the South Korean border and safety.

However, after its presentation, Rogue Warrior: Black Razor felt into obscurity and was briefly mentionned in the beginning of 2007. In 2008, Pete Hines told FiringSquad that the game was still in development without much more information, and on spring 2009, Big Download wrote:

Big Download contacted Bethesda Softworks’ PR head Pete Hines who told us that a status report on Rogue Warrior will be made “in the next month or so.”

Currently up in the air is whether or not the game’s originally announced developer Zombie Studios is still working on the game

Few days later, Bethesda revealed the new version of the project, simply known as Rogue Warrior, with Rebellion Developments (Core Design, in fact) in charge. While interrogating by Shacknews about what happened during all those years, Pete Hines simply answered:

“Suffice it to say, we were not happy with what the direction of that project was. (…) We felt it needed a change in scope and a change in focus. And we felt that that was the focus that it needed. That the sort of squad-based, tactical–in a sense I guess it was turning into a bit of a Navy SEAL game, and it was less of a Richard Marcinko game.”

Without really knowing what was the development time for this new version, it should be noted that Core Design had just released Shellshock 2: Blood Trails in February 2009, less than 10 months before the release of Rogue Warrior. Unsurprisingly, Rogue Warrior was met with extremely negative reviews by the press, appeared to be one of the worst game ever made for the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 generation and was the last game of Core Design, which will close permanently on March 17, 2010.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the first game based on Richard Marcinko’s exploits to be created. Around 1998-1999, Yosemite Entertainment had also a similar game, named Navy SEALs, which was cancelled with the closure of the studio.

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Saw [Beta / Unused Stuff – Xbox 360, PS3, PC]

Saw: The Video Game is a third person survival horror with action elements. It was developed by Zombie Studios and published by Konami. The Gamespot’s video from Konami Gamers Night 2009 is quite interesting. It shows early beta version of first level, where everything is work-in-progress. It is most noticeable that the bathroom and its lighting were different, there was a placeholder character on the place of detective Tapp and the place outside the bathroom looked completely different from the final version of the game.

Information about early beta version of the game was available from the blogspot blog “Dani’s Portfolio” (http://dani-artportfolio.blogspot.com) until it was deleted. The blog post was made in December 2008. This information includes screenshots from very early version of the game. The profile of the post author is still online: http://www.blogger.com/profile/06315382898248523721 . Thankfully, I made a copy of that post before it was deleted, and if you’re interested, you can download it here.

Now, on to the unused content. The PC version of the game comes with level editor included, and unused content can be found by browsing the game’s packages with it. I made two small maps to demonstrate some of it.

Before the release of the game, it was rumored that the character Dr. Gordon will be in it, but he wasn’t found there: the developers cancelled this idea. But they left the character, his 3D model, and some dialogues related to him in the game as an unused content. In the DreadCentral.com interview John Williamson from Zombie, Inc said:

Dr. Gordon is at the top of our lists to explore. He was actually in an early version of the first SAW game, but Lionsgate had plans for him of their own…

Source: http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/39676/saw-ii-flesh-blood-interview-john-williamson-producerdesigner-zombie-inc

Saw game also features ability to make the player play as any character other than Detective Tapp, unused animations, items and characters. Some unused content was used in the Saw 2 game, for example, character Carla.

The Truth Mod uses ability to play as another character, unused music and dialogues. The mod’s teaser video begins with Melissa’s unused dialogue, few seconds later you can hear a couple of unused phrases voiced by Tobin Bell.

Among the pictures included in this article, you can see an image of GUI which says “(PLAYERNAME/GAMERTAG) wishes to join your current game…” (CookedPC\Packages\UI\UI_HUD_Scenes_SAW.upk\JoinRequest). Apparently it was left from 2-player coop mode which was originally planned. The video file SawGame\Movies\trap_fail.bik shows Tapp and Amanda both at the end of the Chapter 2 – Jennings, while in the actual game Amanda gets captured at the beginning of it, so this video looks like another leftover from coop mode.

If you want to see more unused content, launch the game with “editor” command-line parameter and browse the resources with Generic Browser.

Article by EmoLevelDesigner

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Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is a cancelled FPS that was in development in 2002 by Zombie Studios and it would have been published by Bam! Entertainment for the Playstation 2 and later for the Xbox.  The game was based on a 2002 action film with the same name, starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu, often listed among the worst movies ever made. The project was officially cancelled in 2003, probably because of the low rates of the film and some quality problems of the game.

The GBA version of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was developed by Crawfish Interactive and released in 2002.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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