While he was in Japan to interview some legendary gaming developers for his “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers” book, John Szczepaniak also recorded many hours of footage about those meetings and his visits to some interesting japanese places related to videogames. Some of those recordings have been released in a 4-hours-long double DVD titled “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers DVD”, in a limited edition of 500 copies, an interesting item dedicated to gaming collectors and fans of japanese developers, especially those from the early ‘80 and ‘90 (screenshots below from Retro Type).

Along with some intriguing chats on old-school / obscure videogames in Japan and their preservation, visits to Akihabara and popular japanese gaming shops, an interview with one the best game designers that almost no one knows (Yoshiro Kimura), a quick look at the Tokyo Game Show and other more or less compelling materials, John was able to gather some exclusive info about various unreleased games and undeveloped pitch that remained unknown until now.  Here are some personal highlights:

An interview with Kouichi Yotsui (Background Artist and Game designer at Capcom for such classics as Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and Strider) and Roy Ozaki (Producer at Mitchell Corporation ) that show some design docs for unreleased games that were pitched in the ‘90 to Enix and Capcom.

An interview with Yukata Isokawa (creator of Pitman and Namco’s NeGcon controller) with some talks about an unreleased Namco Golf game planned for the original playstation, that would have used the NeGcon controller like a Wiimote.

An interview with Yūichi Toyama (Capcom, Sega, Technosoft, Sting) with some memories about Grand Slam, a cancelled action game inspired by Area 88 manga and Choplifter.

A visit to Keigo Matsubara’s HUGE gaming magazine / book preservation archive (check his website, in japanese). You could try to contact him if you have any questions about old japanese gaming magazines!

A visits to the Preservation Society, a group that tries to repair and save games that could be lost, especially old cartridges and games developed for old PCs that are not available anymore or not emulated. They even show a short game created by Hudson Design School as a test for internal use only.

An interview with Masatoshi Mitori, Masaki Higuchi and other developers talking about an unreleased game they worked on.

A quick look at the first MSX hardware prototype.

An interview with Yuzo Koshiro (music composer that worked on such classics as Streets of Rage, Ys, ActRaiser, Shinobi and much more) and his memories about the cancelled Street of Rage 4 that was pitched for the Dreamcast.

While the audio and video quality are not the best (unfortunately the tripod for the camera used during the trip was broken before even being used), and some of the chapters could be of no interest for someone (there are some parts in which designers talk about their development hardware in japanese software houses in the early ‘90 and try to drawn them on a whiteboard) all those memories about previously unknown lost videogames and from the golden age of japanese gaming made me to love what i saw in this DVD.

Most of the topics discussed in the videos are just a taste of the full interviews and articles that you can read in “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developer” book, but if you are interested to see some of the creators of your favorite games from when you were a kid in the ‘80 and are fascinated by nerdy / otaku japanese lifestyle, you can buy “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers DVD” from Hardcore Gaming 101 and it will go on sale (-10£ less) for Black Friday on the 28th of November!

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Rayman Legends is a 2D platformer by developer, Ubisoft Montpellier, and the follow-up to Rayman Origins. It was released in 2013 on Wii U, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Vita and PC. It originally started as a Wii U exclusive, billed as a launch title for the console’s November 2012 release.

Leaked NFC Concept Trailer

On April 27 2012, the very first footage of Legends emerged online. This was a conceptual video intended for internal purposes only, which was leaked by an anonymous source on YouTube from inside Ubisoft.

The build of the game shown in the reel wasn’t terribly different from the final release, but it did reveal one quite significant feature that was never implemented; nearfield communication support. Towards the end of the clip, it demonstrates a work-in-progress concept for NFC figures, which would have worked with the Wii U gamepad’s built-in chip.

Ubisoft’s video contained two uses of the proposed accessories: a heart figure, which would replenish the player’s health and a Rabbid toy that would cause Rabbids to appear in the game as enemies, as well as in the backgrounds of levels. Towards the end of the video, it hints towards the possibility of other Ubisoft characters, when a figure of Ezio from the Assassin’s Creed series appears.

Mysteriously, the company never followed through on this NFC demo, in spite of the somewhat elaborate nature of the conceptual document. It appears that prototype figurine models were made and their planned in-game affects were programmed, but none of this would ever be officially released to the public.

You can tell that Ubisoft was working with a prototype version of the Wii U hardware when this was made, as it includes an early, wired dev kit gamepad, which was without the NFC badge on the left of the controller. Therefore, the actors in the trailer placed the figures on the screen instead.

Changes Over Leaked Prototype

Although the two versions, the final build and the prototype seen above, aren’t drastically different; we can ascertain a small handful of changes by carefully analysing the footage.

For one, it’s evident that the team had yet to come up with the idea of using the character of Murfy to give context to the gamepad screen mechanics (or at least hadn’t implemented him into the gameplay at this point). Previously seen as a guide in Rayman 2, Murfy appears during specific sections of Legends whenever you interact with levels using the touch screen. Said touch-controlled elements are demonstrated in the video, but Murfy does not appear.

The video also offers a look at an early version of the ‘Challenges’ mode. In the released game, players can compete in short challenges issued on a daily and weekly basis. These include, for instance, endless runner stages in which you compete against others around the world via an online ranking system.

However, as you can see here, Ubisoft had an idea for something quite different. It appears they initially were considering more prominent social gaming elements, wherein you would have been able to create and issue your own challenges to friends.

The final interface for the mode is completely revised from the one shown here and although you can compete against friends with the finished game, you can only do so in the rotation of challenges set by Ubisoft themselves.

Strangely, the leaked design mentions an in-game currency called “Rubis”, although no such thing exists in the game we know today. It seems that you would have needed to pay these ‘rubis’ to play challenges, unlike the final game, that has no entry requirement in order to play them. In addition, the menu specifies a locale named “Ghost’s Pit”, but there are no levels under this name in Legends. Perhaps, this was a working title for another one of the mode’s settings.

At the closing of the clip, an alternative version of the title’s logo arrives on screen. It is largely identical the completed asset, but sports one or two minor differences. The leaked logo used 3D-looking renders around the text, whereas the final one used silhouetted 2D art. The font used for the word “Legends” was made thicker, too.

Unreleased Beta Levels Concepts

Originally, Ubi Montpellier had planned to include a world which they were calling “Chateau Dracula“, which roughly translates to “Dracula Castle“. As you might assume, these stages were to be set within the realms of a large gothic castle. They spanned the outer gardens, through to its macabre interior, which included a dining room and cellar area. You also would have been able to traverse the rooftops.

One of the team’s visual development artists has shared with us some concept art of these stages. As we understand it, they were never prototyped and sadly, only ever remained as still images. Regardless, they offer a good idea of what the developers had planned, given the implicitly small gap between Legends’ concepts and actual in-game graphics.

During a presentation various members of the development crew gave about Legends’ use of the Ubi Art engine, Michael Ancel briefly discussed the unreleased Dracula-themed locale. The designer gave a few examples of gameplay ideas the team had come up with for it, such as hiding within beams of sunlight from the windows to fend off vampiric bat creatures and using French topiary as platforms in the surrounding courtyard. You can see more images of the concepts in the video below.

On the subject of whether or not these levels would ever see the light of day (pun not intended), Ancel simply said “well, maybe one day”. As of October 2014, Ubisoft has announced no plans for DLC or a sequel containing these concepts. According to one artist who worked on the game we spoke to, time and budget constraints prevented these beta designs from being realised. 

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In 1998, Cyan Worlds Inc. and Mattel decided to outsource the work on future Myst game to other developers. This would let Cyan work on their upcoming project Uru while still keeping the Myst main-series afloat duringsaid development period.

Various developers were given a chance to pitch their idea for a story and soon enough Presto Studios was working on the next game in the series, Myst III: Exile. However, they were not the only developer to be assigned the Myst license.

DreamForge Intertainment, the developers of the horror themed adventure game Sanitarium, started work on the fourth Myst game one year after Presto Studios effort. This game, known internally as Myst IV: Adventure Beyond the D’ni Ultraworld, would never be released or shown to the public during its development.

After having worked on the game for two years (June 1999 to June 2001), it was cancelled as the rights to the Myst franchise transferred from Mattel to Ubisoft. Myst III: Exile was released the next year and the next game in the franchise was to be developed internally at Ubisoft and was released in 2004 as Myst IV: Revelation.

Patrick Fortier, the creative director of Myst IV: Revelation, opened up about the unreleased version of Myst IV, hereby referred to as Ultraworld to avoid confusion, in 2004 on the Uru Obsession community.

According to Fortier, Ultraworld’s development was only about 20% finished, but the designs themselves were completely done. The game was presented in realtime 3D, a first for the series at that point. Some ideas from Ultraworld even managed to carry over into Myst IV: Revelation. Specfically the inclusion of Sirrus and Achenar, the two brothers from the original Myst.

Shortly thereafter Areth and Gadren, two users from Uru Obsession community, were able to unearth concept art, screenshots and even video showing off Ultraworld in motion.

The game ran at a low framerate but featured some very beautiful visuals for its time, having complex enviromental design that rivalled, if not outmatched, Cyan’s own 3D project, Uru, at the time. The standard Myst-cursor was still present, stationed in the center of the screen as the player walked around and interacted with the enviroment.

The concept art shows us a look at Atrus, Catherine as well as Sirrus and Achenar’s 3D models. What’s the most interesting about these models is that Sirrus was bald and without facial hair. In his appearance in the original Myst, as well as Myst IV: Revelation, he had well combed hair and a goatee beard.

Two original characters were also featuerd in Ultraworld, Kervis and Merinia. The purpose of these characters are unknown, as is most of Ultraworld’s story. A sketch showing off an “Ice Locall” age is also featured among the concept art, showing a mechnical panel controlling some sort of platform.

After Ultraworld was cancelled DreamForge Intertainment was soon gone. Their last known project was an unfinished Werewolf: the Apocalypse game that eventually led to the shutdown of the company. Not much else is known about Myst IV: Adventure Beyond the D’ni Ultraworld and the Uru Obsessed community has since closed down.

Ubisoft’s Myst IV: Revelation would be released in 2004 for PC and Xbox, but the resume for Ande Gaumond claims a prototype was made for PC, PlayStation and Gamecube. Whether or not this potential prototype was another unknown attempt at Myst IV or an early version of Myst IV: Revelation is unknown.

Article by Andrea Ritsu

Sources:

• Rob Breisch: Modeled and textured scenes for a Myst 4 proposal.
• Greg Stangl: Myst IV PC • June 99 – June 01 (Cancelled). Modeled and textured various rooms, outdoor areas, and prop items. Modeled and textured all trees and plants for background environments and interior decoration. Created special effects such as rain wash over windows, color changing Mood flowers and morphing statues.
• Kim Haines: Unreleased Titles: Myst IV, Ubisoft Entertainment changed developers (PC) 1999-2001″
• Sunil Ketty: Myst IV – Not released by Dreamforge. Core responsibilities included all game lighting and the creation of low polygon models and texturing.
• Marty Stoltz: DreamForge Intertainment 1995-2001 Greensburg, PA. Cinematic Director / Post-Production Supervisor. Directed and edited all pre-rendered and in-game cinematics. Created post-production effects and compositing. Designed and Created all animatics. Supervised cinematic team.
• Andre Gaumond: MYST IV –  PROTOTYPE “, Playstation, GameCube and PC game, produced by Ubi Soft Entertainment
• MYSTerium: Concept Art – Renders – Screenshots

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The Last of Us is an action game developed by Naughty Dog and published in 2013 by Sony Computer Entertainment for their PlayStation 3. The project was started in 2009, after the Uncharted 2 team was split in 2 to create a a Jak & Daxter reboot along with Uncharted 3. When they designed some concept arts for the cancelled Jak & Daxter 4 project, they thought that the style and target they were aiming for was too distant from the J&D IP and so decided to create a new IP, using some of Neil Druckmann’s ideas from an old concept that he did at school. That new IP was initially known as “Mankind” before to be changed into The Last of Us.

As we can read on TheVerge:

Just like in The Last of Us, [Mankind] was set in a world where Cordyceps has leaped from insects to humans, turning the infected into dangerous monsters and bringing down civilization with them. The key difference was that in Mankind, the virus only affected women. An early version of Ellie was the only female who was immune, and Joel decided to protect her in order to bring her to a lab where a cure could potentially be created.

During the development of The Last Of Us, many features were removed and the story was changed a lot, before to arrive to the final version. As we can read on GameInformer, in the original plot::

Joel partners with Tess to smuggle Ellie out of the locked-down city. In the alternate story the gang is halted at a security checkpoint. Ellie is screened for infection and comes up positive, but the guards don’t care that she may carry an immunity that could save humanity. Joel sees Ellie at gunpoint, which reminds him of his dead daughter, and goes berserk. He kills the guards, leaves with Ellie, and ends up betraying his partner Tess, who embarks on a cross-country pursuit of vengeance.

Neil Druckmann also shared some memories from a different ending for the game:

“The original ending when we pitched the game was a much more hopeful ending, where Joel and Ellie make it to San Francisco and that is a town run by people who are trying to restore society,” he continues. “Joel has killed all these doctors and lied to Ellie, and Ellie just fully buys into the lie. So, you’re left with the idea that they are going to live the rest of their lives in this town. The camera pulls back and maybe everything is going to be alright for these two. I was working on writing, and it didn’t feel honest anymore. After everything they’ve done and everything they’ve been through, that was letting them off a little too easy – especially for Joel.”

Some more changes and removed content are:

• Downgraded Artificial Intelligence: it seems that enemies were “too difficult” for the players and it was not fun to always get surrounded and killed by a group of “intelligent” enemies (see the videos below).
• Marlene was originally meant to die in the surgeon room
• Some enemies were cut or the design was heavily changed, see them in the gallery below
• They removed a dog companion that would have followed Ellie and Joel during the game

An unseen epilogue scene performed during The Last of Us: One Night Live was set 4 years after the end of the game with Joel and Ellie talking and playing a guitar, but it seems that this scene was never meant to be added ot the game: it was just a scene wrote for the live show.

More concept arts and info on the development of the game could have been published in the Art of Last of Us artbook (23$ on Amazon COM, 20£ on Amazon UK, 27 euro on Amazon IT), if you have the book let us know! If you notice more differences in the early beta screens and videos from The Last of Us, leave a comment below!

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Baby Titus, also known as Titus Jr, is a cancelled Game Boy Color platform game featuring Titus the Fox (Titus’ mascot) that was in development by Mike Mika and Bob Baffy for Titus. Originally Baby Titus started as an original GameBoy game and it seems the project was almost complete, but Titus wanted to upgrade it for the “new” GBC released in 1998. While the team was working on adding colors to the game, Titus had some economic problems and did not pay the developers, so they had to stop working on it.

One video from the game was shared by Mike on Youtube and a couple of screenshot were found by eSPy in an old magazine scan.

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Lufia and the Fortress of Doom is a rpg developed by Neverland and released by Taito for SNES in 1993. A (north-american only?) port for Sega Genesis was supposed to be released in 1994, but it got delayed and Taito America eventually closed down in 1995.

However, in 2014, the western programmer that worked on the port leaked a tech demo, featuring just the title screen and a testing dungeon, of the Genesis version of Lufia on the internet. According to him, he had just six months to finish the project:

Well, one of the reasons it was cancelled was because they told me to complete the port in 6 months.. there was no way in hell I could have done it since all the original SNES code was fucking indecipherable and the Japan programmers weren’t any help..

For more informations check the original opa-ages topic.

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Ryse: Son of Rome is an action adventure game, which was developed by Crytek and published by Microsoft Studios in late 2013 on the Xbox One at the console’s launch. However, it was originally planned to be a first person brawler exclusively for the Xbox 360 under another title. This great turn in direction is just one of the numerous twists that occurred throughout its development.

Kings & Kingdoms

Years before the name ‘Ryse’ would come to be, the basis of the project was born in 2006. It was the brainchild of Crytek Co-Founder, Cevat Yerli, and was imagined then not as one game, but two. One half of the coin was a title called “Kings” – an ambitious MMO where the player joins the ranks of various factions to fight for supremacy in a mythical world of monsters and sorcerers. The other was Kingdoms, a smaller scale first person game focussed around more intimate ground combat between soldiers of warring sides. At this time, no platform was attached to it.

Early concept art for Kingdoms from 2006.

The initial plan for these two games was that they would have been set in the same fantasy-themed universe, informing one another as development went on. Crytek put together a variety of concept art and basic prototypes for them, attempting to flesh out their ideas and convey their ideas more thoroughly as the company began showing them privately to publishers.

Behind the scenes, the world of Kings & Kingdoms was steadily coming together and over the years that the developer toiled away on it, a multitude of concepts for everything from characters to settings was produced. Fortunately, we have been able to preserve a good amount of these for your curiosity.

2007 Art:

 Later environment/character art:

 Character Art:

That CryEngine 3 Demo

At Gamescom 2009, Yerli gave a presentation on CryEngine 3 to a small audience of attendees. Included in this was a brief tech demo with a medieval fantasy setting very similar to the one portrayed by the early art of Kingdoms, leaving many to retrospectively assume a connection after the game was announced in 2010.

Although this goes without any formal confirmation, there certainly at least seems to be a relation between Kingdoms and this demonstration based upon some of Yerli’s statements at the event. During his talk, a member of the crowd asked whether or not the medieval environment had anything to do with some of Crytek’s cancelled projects. Laughing, the developer commented:

“I don’t know… I don’t think we have so many cancelled projects. Time will tell. Sooner or later, we will all know”

Despite clarifying later that this piece was a tech demo specifically made for Gamescom, his answer definitely suggests that it was in some form based around the thematics of Kings or Kingdoms. It also gives the impression that he was unsure whether or not Kingdoms would ever be made, implying that Crytek still had yet to find a publisher at this point (which we now know to be true).

The connection is further supported by the fact that when the game would later go on to be developed for the Xbox 360, it was being built in this same engine.

Microsoft Comes On Board

Later that year, Microsoft began to take an interest in the projects in a move lead by Phil Spencer, who was head of Microsoft Game Studios at the time. Spencer had been looking for a good opportunity to work with the developer, after having met Yerli years previously. While Microsoft was not interested in developing an MMO for the 360, Spencer still wanted to pursue Kingdoms. He was looking to expand the console’s portfolio, which he thought was lacking in the melee combat genre and he also thought that it could open the floodgates for other developers wanting to license CryEngine 3 on the system.

Concept Art for Kings.

Without a publisher backing it and wanting to move forward with Kingdoms, Crytek cancelled their plans for Kings. With the scope of their ambition being effectively halved this decision, the company began to rethink the world of Kingdoms with first person melee combat still at its core.

The First Take On Rome

While Crytek UK and Frankfurt were busy working on Crysis 2, Kingdoms was given to their Budapest team towards the end of 2009. To help them reimagine Kingdoms with an entirely new look, German art team, Karakter Design Studio, was contracted to create concept art for characters and settings. Karakter was an integral part of moulding the game’s visual style, even if a lot of the work they did was ultimately strayed from.

“Numerous character and prop designs became obsolete or were changed drastically as the story was forged into its final shape.” – Karakter representative.

Together, the companies reworked the ideas driving Kingdoms into a more realistic Roman themed game, away from the fantasy realms of before. Their original vision for Rome was in many ways vastly different from the one seen in the final game. Karakter and the Budapest crew imagined a more colourful, majestic city at the height of its power. This more vibrant side of the locale would never really be seen in Ryse: Son of Rome, however, as it is regularly under siege from barbarians, on the brink of collapse.

This wasn’t all that would change. The characters, too, evolved quite considerably as the game’s story grew more elaborate. Tobias Mannewitz, the creative director of Karakter mentioned their younger version of emperor Nero as a particular example of this:

“At this point during development, the emperor was thought of as a cold hearted, power hungry technocrat. His palace reflected these uncomfortable qualities. Eventually, the emperor developed into a more luxurious, lavish character.”

It appears that entire characters were cut from the script as time went on, including an elderly man called Lucious and a sidekick for the main protagonist, Marius, named Severus. The concept image for Severus gives us a little bit of insight into what the character might have been like.

Karakter helped to realise the location of Glott’s Hop, a Caledonion (Scottish) base of occultist Barbarians; a level from from partway through the story mode, as well. Originally, Karakter had planned to represent these lands as snowy blue forests instead of the dark, grey landscapes seen in the released game.

The art team was also playing around with the idea of introducing minotaur enemies into the mix. In Son of Rome, Glott’s Hop is populated by foes based on picts, who are dressed in tribal outfits that include masks made from the hollowed skulls and horns of dead bulls. To exaggerate and better portray the “superstitious horror” felt by the Romans as they encountered these hostiles, Karakter wanted them to appear to the player as actual minotaur-like creatures. This element of psychological horror was dropped later in development and in the final game, they are shown to be regular barbarian soldiers.

Codename: Kingdoms

After years of tinkering behind the scenes, the existence of the Kingdoms project was finally divulged to the public at E3 2010. Crytek showed the first trailer for the game during Microsoft’s press conference, an enigmatic teaser that was intentionally vague. The game had been given the tentative title of ‘Codename: Kingdoms’.

“We were trying not to show that it was Roman at that stage. There were kind of hints of Roman in the trailer, but that was our secret we weren’t sharing.” – Nick Button-Brown

The clip, which can be seen below, showed a live action video of three actors posing as soldiers and a voiceover hinting at the game’s themes of rebellion and corruption.

Around this time, the game was being targeted for a 2011 release.

The Game You Never Got To See

The first reveal of ‘Codename: Kingdoms’ came and went, but Microsoft and Crytek remained completely tight-lipped as to the title’s nature. To the wider world, the game would remain a mystery for some time and when it did finally emerge, it had changed in a big way. No screenshots, gameplay clips or other material ever was released of the original first person game that was in development in Budapest. Not even a single leak managed to penetrate the publisher’s walls of strict non-disclosure agreements. It would take years for anyone to be able to recover anything on it, but we thankfully have been able to.

An in-game screenshot of Codename Kingdoms.

The image above is an unaltered in-game screenshot of what Kingdoms apparently would have looked like running on the Xbox 360, according to our source, a former employee of Crytek Budapest. At this stage in development, Kinect control had yet to be introduced and it was a first person melee combat game with conventional button controls. According to Yerli, who spoke to CVG about the project in January 2011, they were intending for the game to use the full capacity of the 360’s hardware.

“… I think when we put Crysis 2 out we will show a level that is, multiplatform-wise, maxing out, but we will look into with Microsoft how Kingdoms can push the Xbox 360 110 percent, to its limits.”

During this part of development, the story of Kingdoms was still very different from the released game. Much of it revolved around Roman general, Julias Caesar and his elite guard, made up of the toughest warriors from around the world, who he handpicked himself. Caesar, in the end, was never present in Son of Rome, having been removed completely.

Although they never got as far as rendering most of them into the game, Crytek Budapest did create profiles for the member of Caesar’s chosen soldiers, which give us a bit of background on each of them. This varied group of characters would have accompanied the player throughout the campaign.

The hero of Kingdoms, who had not been given a name yet, was younger and less experienced than Marius, the protagonist of the Xbox One game. Little of the narrative itself had been figured out at this stage outside of these details, as Crytek Budapest had still yet to decide on much of the project’s overall direction.

The original hero of Ryse.

In addition, the team drafted concepts for a battle in the campaign set during Winter with a backdrop of arctic mountains. Just like the original version of Glott’s camp, there was no snowy locale realised ultimately in either Budapest’s Kingdoms title or Son of Rome.

We’ve also been able to recover a number of the character models made to give you a greater idea of the level of graphical fidelity being aimed for. These were created between 2009-2010 during Budapest’s time on the project and were all scrapped later in development.

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Additional 2010 concept art by David Smit:

Ruffian’s Multiplayer and DLC Campaign

Towards the start of September 2010, Ruffian Games had just concluded their plans to support Crackdown 2 with downloadable content, freeing them to tackle other projects. Wasting little time, the developer threw itself into Kingdoms, having acquired a contract to work externally on a multiplayer component for the game.

This multiplayer section of Kingdoms started as a competitive arena-based battle mode. The prototypes made for it by Ruffian consisted of three maps and would have pitted player against player over Xbox Live.

Ruffian also took it upon themselves to devise a prototype for an extension to the game’s main campaign, which would have been released as downloadable content. Whereas the story mode being put together by Crytek was set primarily in Rome, this additional storyline proposed by Ruffian took place in a Roman-occupied Egypt during the year 31 BC. This prototype for the DLC was created by a small group of developers in no more than 6 weeks.

Ryse – Cancelled DLC Level Prototype Gameplay from Liam Robertson on Vimeo.

As a placeholder, the prototype used the song ‘Six Against One’ by composer, Joseph LoDuca from the soundtrack to the TV show, ‘Spartacus Blood and Sand’.

Ryse Up From The Couch

Not long after E3, Crytek began looking into Microsoft’s upcoming Kinect hardware and drew plans to potentially implement it into Kingdoms. The Budapest branch formulated a pitch for Microsoft, showing how they thought it could work in the context of a brawler.

Crytek’s proposal was fairly basic, only consisting of concept art renders like storyboards, but gives us a little more insight into Budapest’s unrealised version of the game. They envisioned a scenario where the player would take up arms as an unnamed gladiator, performing kicks, punches and slashes towards the Kinect sensor to slay other soldiers. The storyboards used to convey their idea showed a man in an everyday living room set-up stepping up from the comfort of his sofa to battle a barbarian with motion control. He mimicked waving a sword with his right hand and gestured holding a shield with his left.

These concepts were noticeably much more exagerrated and over-the-top in tone than the game that would eventually come to be. One of them even shows the player sending the enemy flying through the air and smashing into a column with nothing more than a kick. There was also the idea of a “bloodlust meter”, which, when filled, allowed you to perform deliver deadly finishing blow; in this case, decapitation.

Microsoft took well to Crytek’s ideas and decided that Kingdoms would be well suited to Kinect, according to Phil Spencer. Before long, it was already being built into the game by around November. Back at external developer, Ruffian, they were starting to build support for the peripheral into their multiplayer prototypes as well, aiming to enable Kinect V Kinect play online.

Trouble In Budapest

Work continued on the game still referred to internally as Kingdoms, but behind the scenes, the project was becoming increasingly in jeopardy at Crytek Budapest. Development was progressing behind schedule and after a year, it had yet to advance beyond the stage of prototyping. The team was running into regular setbacks both creatively and technically. Not only were they experiencing “issues with Kinect development” initially, one former employee told us; there was also the matter of them being unable to settle on a concrete direction for the gameplay.

There were growing doubts about whether or not full Kinect control was appropriate for a game targeting itself towards a “hardcore audience” that had previously shown indifference towards the tech during its unveiling. As such, the Budapest offices had made three prototypes at this point: the aforementioned standard controller first person mode which also had minor elements of Kinect, one with solely Kinect inputs, and another, fully button-based option in the third person. Ruffian Games, separately, had been experimenting with each of the three gameplay types during their prototyping too.

Unsatisfied with the results they were producing, it was in January 2011 that Microsoft eventually intervened and had Crytek pull the project away from the Budapest team. They also ended their contract with Ruffian, binning the prototypes they had made for multiplayer and campaign DLC. The responsibility of developing the game was now in the hands of Crytek HQ in Frankfurt.

5 months later, Gamasutra reported that they had received a tip from an anonymous source inside Crytek Budapest, claiming that the majority of the staff there were about to be laid off. Around 50 employees were let go, shrinking the studio to a group of 30-35 people. This was later confirmed by Crytek themselves, who had immediately transitioned the remaining staff into working on mobile platforms.

Despite the circumstances of the their dismissal, one one of the former artist we spoke to from the company described his time there as “a great experience” and the game as “a dream project” for them.

Back To Frankfurt

As Kingdoms returned to Crytek’s Frankurt offices, development continued with Kinect in mind, although its new developers still retained the three prototypes worked on previously. The Frankfurt team, also, was questioning whether or not motion controls were suitable. For the following seven months, the game was effectively in limbo as they continued to experiment and figure out if Kinect really was the way forward.

Why ‘Ryse’?

A few months into 2011, Crytek had finally moved on from the working title of ‘Codename: Kingdoms’ when the game was renamed ‘Ryse’. According to Yerli, Crytek had originally wanted to call it “Rise”, but were unable to due to copyright issues. The suggestion to alter the spelling to ‘Ryse’ came from Microsoft, according to Polygon.

E3 2011

One year on from its first unveiling, it was once again time for the game to be shown off to the public as E3 2011 loomed. It was unknown to the rest of the world, but in reality, Crytek were still undecided in its direction and despite a full 12 months of work, little progress had been made towards finishing it.

Ant Farm, a creative advertising agency, was then called in to assist with putting together a trailer for the title. The company elected to use a combination of pre-rendered CGI cinematics and live action footage, as the game was “in no shape to be shown off” at this point, a developer commented.

An artist involved with the trailer told us that Crytek was “deeply concerned” with sending the right message at E3 that year. They would reveal that their new game supported Kinect for the first time and was cautious about ensuring it would appeal to the “hardcore audience” they were targeting. “This would be the first Kinect game for the core and it was very important to them that it look tough and cool-looking“, the source continues.

With some similarities to the aforementioned storyboard art from 2010, the trailer showed a man in a living room gesturing in front of his TV to control a soldier with Kinect in the first person.

The trailer revealed the newly-revised name for Kingdoms, Ryse, although the subtitle of “Son of Rome” would not be added until much further down the line.

A Dragon’s Lair Style Cinematic Approach

Throughout 2011, Crytek’s Frankfurt offices was working on a more “cinematic” version of Ryse. As Kinect was now central to the title, the creative lead on the project, Rasmus Hojengaard, suggested that a more guided, on-rails experience with a more story-heavy angle might be the way to go. According to Polygon, Yerli responded well to his idea, seeing it as a revival of games like Dragon’s Lair.

It was worked on for a number of months, before being scrapped. It would have been a very narrative-driven title, one source told us, lasting “probably no more than 4 hours” and featured branching paths with multi-choice dialogue trees. Crytek apparently believed that it was too hard a sell for an audience expecting a product more substantial and interactive.

Character model renders:

Another New Protagonist

As development continued to slowly chug along, Crytek was beginning to completely rework the in-game storytelling as they started to hone in on the one eventually featured in Son of Rome. This involved redoing the protagonist of Kingdoms from scratch.

Whereas the hero of Budapest’s title was a younger-looking soldier, their new character was considerably older. He was a more masculine, bulkier chap of the name Evander and would be the final stepping stones towards Marius.

The Three Prototypes

As previously mentioned, Crytek had at this point developed three separate work-in-progress prototypes for Ryse at this point. One was in the first person, controlled by Kinect only, the second blended together the 360 controller and Kinect, also in first person; and the last had a third person perspective with buttons only.

Later in the year, Crytek decided that it was finally time to bite the bullet and figure out for certain which to go with. A company-wide survey was conducted, inviting people from all over the developer’s offices to play the three prototypes and choose their favourite. “We tried to make it as scientific as possible”, Patrick Esteves told Polygon. However, the team faced a dilemma; there was a near perfect division between people who favoured each. Every version had its fans.

The group then expanded their reach, testing it out in Microsoft user research labs and with close relatives of the company. In the end, the results began to tilt in favour of the third person demo. People found it more rewarding and suitable for the experience, seeing the character in front of them; especially as it had grown into a more story-driven game at this juncture. Noticing this, Crytek settled on creating a brand new game with this angle.

Into To The Next Generation

With a great deal of the work done over previous years having to be scrapped, Crytek Frankfurt was setting their sites on a new horizon and starting almost entirely from scratch. Although, their transition into developing a third person game had come so late in the 360’s lifespan that Crytek’s management didn’t believe it was worth even building it for the console anymore.

The Xbox One was still a good deal of time away from being completed, but it was no secret to the developer, which remained in communication with Microsoft, that a next generation Xbox was, indeed, on its way. With that in mind, the devs commenced work on the project once again, but this time, with unspecified next gen hardware as a base. It would be initially created for PC until Microsoft would later divulge to Crytek prototypes of the One system.

Any and all plans for the long-awaited 360 version of Ryse were abandoned, as the game continued its journey to release; the remainder of which was comparatively far less bumpy.

Crytek maintains that none of the big changes made to Ryse were imposed on them for negative reasons:

“We’re thankful that we’re not in a situation where these changes were forced on us for negative reasons, but rather that they represent the growing ambition of Crytek as a company and the increased belief in “Ryse” as a game that really push boundaries and take players somewhere new.” – Changing Perspective – An Introduction to Ryse: Son of Rome

Early concepts for Marius + other characters:

 

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Over the last few years, publications and books such as Retro Gamer Magazine and Atari Inc. tried to recount in detail the history of western video games. However, due to language and cultural differences, the origins of the Japanese gaming industry, if we exclude Pixel’n love books, most of which remain nonetheless available only in French, are still poorly documented.

Then again nothing seems to be impossible anymore in our crowdfunding age, and consequently, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign, even a freelance journalist like John Szczepaniak, already a contributor of various magazines and websites among which the excellent Hardcore Gaming 101, had the chance to go in Japan to interview mostly unknown programmers, game designers, illustrators and musicians, active in that extraordinary video games period that were the eighties and  the nineties. The result is the first volume of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers.

From the very beginning it is evident that one of the big draws of the book are exclusive info about Japanese home computers from the eighties, platforms virtually unknown in the west but that were the first training ground for many newcomers in the gaming industry, who, economic and technical limitations notwithstanding, went to release many innovative or socially relevant games.

A very creative era, therefore, where even small software houses could create groundbreaking experiences such as Manbiki Shounen, the first stealth game (released November 1979) according to John Szczepaniak, or became the subject of parliamentary discussion with 177, a trashy eroge in which the goal was to chase and then rape a young woman .

This rough yet fascinating world is unfortunately on the verge of disappearance due to the extreme rarity of some titles and the fragility of the medium, typically floppy disks or tapes, on which they were originally published.

That’s why we find in the book an interview with the curator of the Game Preservation Society, an organization dedicated to catalogue and preserve, both in their original format and by making a digital copy, all the Japanese games released in the period that goes from the seventies to the nineties. Unfortunately, many old titles are already lost forever because nobody thought to archive them at the time.

Doujin Games and Visual Novels are two other topics that historically had little coverage in the west, although in recent times, thanks to the advent of digital stores, the number of these games available in English is growing. Valuable from this point of view are thus the long conversation with ZUN, the creator of Touhou, an incredibly successful indie franchise, as well as the interview with Ryukishi07, who introduces us to the narrative techniques of Higurashi, a celebrated series of visual novels mostly known in the west for the eponymous anime.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t find in The Untold History of Japanese Videogames Developers new facts about more popular videogames. Suikoden fans, for example, will certainly appreciate the interview with the director of the first three chapters of the series, Yoshitaka Murayama, while SEGA long-time supporters can look forward to an in-depth overview of Yuzo Koshiro’s old works.

John Szczepaniak: Describe when and how you joined Konami.

Yoshitaka Murayama: I joined Konami as a new graduate in 1992 in the role of programmer. In my second year after joining the department, I was in was put in charge of creating games for Konami’s game machine and that’s when I got involved in game design. Since it was an extremely secret project inside of Konami, there were very few people involved. So even though I was close to being a new recruit, I was expected to play a very large role. The plan at first was for Konami’s game machine to be a console type and it was suggested that it have a card reader function to allow players to exchange data. The plan changed midway from a console type to a portable type game machine, and it was going to have 3D (polygon) functionality that was not common at the time.

More interestingly for Unseen64, John Szczepaniak also asked, when he could, about beta and unreleased games. This is just a incomplete list of what he discovered, confirmed or got further info in the book:

• The Saturn version of Grandstream Saga;
• A sketch of Soul Blazer 2;
• Ys 3 wasn’t originally an Ys game;
• The unreleased Namco console;
• Bounty Arms, a cancelled Playstation game;
• A photo of an unreleased game made by Yuzo Koshiro, Variant 7;
• Amazing Island, a gamecube title originally started on saturn and later moved to dreamcast;
• Street Fighter NES;
• Unreleased Negcon Games;
• Chulip original version;

With 36 interviewees and more than 500 pages, The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers is a book full of previously unknown and interesting info for fans of retrogaming and obscure japanese developers. We are happy that many info on cancelled projects and facts about the development of some of our favorite games were preserved in this book, huge props to John for his work! If you don’t like to read, you can also check The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers DVD ;)

You can buy The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers in paperback and digital from (they will be on-sale untill the end of  December 2014):

• Amazon.com: Paperback Silver (35.99$), Paperback Gold (44.99$) and Kindle digital (12.45$)
• Amazon.co.uk: Paperback Silver (19.28£), Paperback Gold (26.33£) and Kindle Digital (9.31£)
• Amazon.it: Paperback Silver (25.18 euro), Paperback Gold (31.70 euro) and Kindle Digital (9.99 euro)
• Also available on all other Amazon sites. Please search for them directly!

Some video-reviews of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers from Youtube:

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Overstorm is a cancelled action / platform game created by Quantized Bit for Game Boy Advance. It was shown publicly only once in a 2003 gaming convention. However, in 2014, the developers decided to give away an alpha build of the game, featuring five different levels, in a Indiestand game sale of their last product, Volt:

Beat the average to get the bonus content, which is: 5-levels alpha-stage Overstorm game (our older, never released GBA project) – you can play it in any GBA emulator in a fullscreen mode!

Images:

Video:

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Doom Absolution (AKA Doom 64 2) is the cancelled sequel to Doom 64, that was planned by Midway San Diego & ID Software to be a multiplayer-focused game developed for 2 players deathmatch mode (as the first game’s multiplayer mode was removed) , somehow like what happened with Turok Rage Wars, the multiplayer-only Turok that Acclaim released on Nintendo 64  to follow the GoldenEye deathmatch craze. As we can read from an interview with Aaron Seeler (lead programmer for Doom 64):

At that time, as dm purists, most everybody involved thought it silly to play dm split screen, where you could see everybody else. So, we chose not to do it. 007 beat the crap out of Doom 64. Quite a regret.

Doom Absolution was officially canned in July 1997, when the project was still in early development (Doom 64 was released in March/April 1997) and sadly there are no images to be preserved. It seems that the game was cancelled because the Doom engine looked dated at the time and they decided to work on Quake 64 port instead, a “newer” fully 3D FPS that could have had sell more copies within the market.

Is interesting to notice that originally Doom 64 was started as a project called “The Absolution” but the title was later changed for brand recognition. Still “The Absolution” was reused as the name of the last level of the game.

We tried to get in contact with some people from Midway San Diego that worked on the original Doom 64 and its sequel but with no luck, if you know someone that could have more info about this cancelled Doom game, please let us know!

Images:

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Thanks to all our patrons and some one-off donations from friends we are now at 65% of our goal to pay the Unseen64 server for 2015! If we keep up like this we should able to fully pay the server before our August 2015 deadline. In the following months we’ll have some new, interesting stuff coming up on Unseen64, this year will be full of games that you’ll never play.

Thanks again for your help, we are really happy for your support :)

The post We are now at 65% of our goal to pay the Unseen64 server for 2015! appeared first on Unseen 64: Beta, Cancelled & Unseen Videogames!.

Black 2 is the cancelled sequel to Criterion Games‘ 2006 shooter, Black, which was being worked on by the same developer for publisher and IP holder, Electronic Arts. It was planned to be a co-op shooter for the Xbox 360 and PS3 with a release in late 2007/early 2008.

Concept art for Black 2’s logo.

The Original Idea For Black 2

Despite recurring rumours of Black 2 rumbling for several years after the release of the original game, its development was, in actuality, rather short-lived and it never was able to leave pre-production. As it turns out, EA and Criterion had plans to expand Black into a franchise for some time before the first game was even released. Preliminary work on the sequel commenced as early as April 2005, a whole 10 months before Black was finished.

Artists were contracted externally to produce conceptual documents for the game, including drawings of the protagonist, Jack Kellar. According to one of the artists who spent a short period of time on the project, there was some debate over the direction the follow-up would take. One possible path, for example, would have continued the story of the first game, as Kellar continues his hunt for Lennox at the behest of the US government.

Jack Kellar concept art:

A Reboot of The IP?

As we have come to understand, Criterion’s time drafting concepts with a third party art studio ended around October 2005. It was then put on the back-burner until the first Black was completed. Apparently, the team was also considering another, alternative direction for the sequel that would have been completely separate and self-contained from the original in terms of narrative. This is where the idea of making it as a “co-op shooter” game originated.

To our knowledge, the specifics of the story behind these characters was not figured out, but they would have been the basis of this other new version of Black, had it been made.

Creative Differences

According to one of our sources, formerly of Criterion, pre-production on Black 2 after the release of the original initially lasted several months before grinding to a halt around May 2006. The source claims that there was a disagreement between key members of Criterion and EA over how to proceed with the game and the direction it should take. Allegedly, Stuart Black, a senior designer on the first game, actually left the company over the matter.

“As I recall, Stuart Black left over a disagreement with the direction it should take” “…he wanted it be more closely tied to Black and they couldn’t reach an agreement over it”

Despite this, it appears that plans to produce another Black game remained in the pipeline for some time after this. Following Stuart Black’s departure, work on the project steadily continued and it began adopt the latter route of a co-op shooter, abandoning the story elements of the first game.

The cast of Black 2.

It was in November 2006 that EA somewhat quietly announced that it was officially happening. During their quarterly review on November 2, chief financial officer Warren Jenson was quoted as saying:

“There’s a new SimCity game in the pipeline and the next-generation version of Black”

Jenson’s wording (“next-generation version”) is perhaps worthy of note, as it seems to support our source’s suggestions that Black 2 would have been something of a reboot with little ties to the first game other than on a gameplay level; as opposed to a direct sequel. Regardless, it appears that it was shortly after this fiscal statement when the title fell apart. It has never again been mentioned publicly again by EA staff and was absent from all of their future financial reports. Had development moved forward successfully, it would have been released during their 2007 fiscal year, which ended March 31, 2008.

The finite details of what exactly went wrong with the project have yet to be divulged by Criterion, but our sources indicate that it was EA’s decision to terminate the project over a “lack of direction“. It never advanced past pre-production, although a decent amount of material was created for it, including a “concept trailer”.

Another logo concept for the reboot.

The Mysterious Target X

Years later, Black 2’s concept trailer was discussed by Alex Ward, formerly Criterion’s creative director, on August 5, 2013 via Twitter. Ward unfortunately declined to share the video, but thanks to the pleas of Geoff Keighley, he released two screenshots of the trailer. He has since deleted these tweets, but we were able to preserve the images before hand.

According to the developer, the video was titled “Target X“. When asked why he didn’t wish to upload it to the public, he explained “by today’s standards, it probably wouldn’t hold up if truth be told. Times have sure changed”.

We spoke to one former Criterion employee who contributed to the Target X trailer, who elaborated on it for us:

“We were experimenting with how lighting could come into play during gameplay. The trailer showed how different effects such as that could make combat more interesting and dynamic…”

Apparently, this concept belongs to an earlier stage of Black 2’s pre-production period and is more reflective of Criterion’s original vision for the game, as opposed to what it ultimately became.

Additional concept logo variants:

 

The post Black 2 [Xbox 360, PS3 – Cancelled] appeared first on Unseen 64: Beta, Cancelled & Unseen Videogames!.

In the last few months (from august 2014) we were able to get the Unseen64 database back online (some of you could remember that this site was down for months because of some technical issues) and to return to publish weekly updates to add all those unseen games that are still missing from the archive. We have many, MANY games and contributions that still need to be added to the U64 archive and with 1 or 2 new games added to the archive every week, we still have some years of work to do :)

Well, there’s no hurry. Unseen64 is fully back and we’ll be here as long as it’s needed, slowly remembering all those games that we’ll never play. With the new Unseen64 Forum hosted on Facebook (so it will not be lost again), our Twitter account for daily updates on the unseen gaming world, many ways to help U64, all the other gamers, youtubers and websites that also work to preserve beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, it will probably be easier to save as much as it’s possible from these unseen videogames.

Unseen64 is still online thanks to all those awesome people that shared one-off donations and pledges on Patreon to help to pay the server cost. As we wrote before, we are at 65% of our goal to fully pay the U64 server for 2015 and continuing like this, together we’ll be able to keep the site online for all the following years.

We’d like to thank all these people (in random order) that help U64 with their donations:

Ash The Dragon, Shane G., Raphael P., Alex K., Anders I., Akspa, Martin, Elmo Bluegeek, Irvin, James S., Tony, Mark J., Samuel G., Justin J, Ethan M, Shawn O, Michele Z, Jordan A., Brendan A. and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

 We <3 you

The post Thank you! Yes, YOU! appeared first on Unseen 64: Beta, Cancelled & Unseen Videogames!.

Ross Sillifant sent us a lot of contributions, info and interviews about cancelled videogames and their development, from different software houses and for various consoles / PC. To be able to publish all those info we’ll need more time, but to start here’s a first collection of random facts that should be saved in the Unseen64 archive!

Mike Singleton (RIP) was working on Midwinter III, for PS2 and Dolphin (GameCube) working title was Skyfall Year Zero: Total Midwinter.  See Arcade Mag Timewarp March 1990 and this tweet by Chris Wild.

Activision CANNED PS1 Hyperblade (A futuristic rollerblading sport game) after almost 12 months in development, Activision unwilling to disclose reasons why it was canned though.

Interview with Andrew Hewson:

Q) Is it true you had a PC Engine version of Paradroid ’90 all finished and it was to be Hewson’s 1st crack at the emerging console market? If so, what became of it? Was it never released because PCEngine didn’t get a UK release?

Andrew:Umm, that’s news to me.

Interview with Stuart Gregg:

Shadowrunner: Do you have any unreleased games on any platforms you’d like to share with us?

Stuart: I did port Rick Dangerous to the Acorn Archimedes, I have no idea where that is.

Shadowrunner: There was supposed to be an Atari Jaguar CD release of Demolition Man and there’s even a really early beta floating around. Do you know how far along it was, and if there would have been differences between it and the 3DO version?

Stuart: The first time I have heard of it…

Stuart: I really liked Ian Stewart and It was a good laugh with Neal Young when he was a producer at Probe. I think my mind is blocking out the pain as I can’t remember anyone I want to dump on. If you asked me at the time I’m sure the answer would be different. Does anyone have the alternate ending to Dynamite Düx ?

Stuart:  I worked on some things at Virgin that never came out, I should have paid attentions to the alarm bells going off in my head, LOL.

Interview with Mike Fullton about Jaguar Quake:

Quake didn’t come out on the PC until mid ’96, like 9 months after I had left Atari.  By that time, new Jaguar projects were pretty much non-existent. So it seems unlikely that there was anything going there, at least not with ID.  It’s far more likely that someone started playing around with the QUAKE source code when it was released.

The big hurdle to overcome for Quake (as well as Tomb Raider) would have been the lack of a texture-mapping 3D library.  Having such a library would take development of the game from 0% to about 70% in one jump, so someone saying QUAKE was 30-40% done sounds like they were talking about someone working on a library, not so much the game itself.

Interview with Andrew Holdroyd about Wolfenstien 3D on Sega Mega Drive (Never finished or released)

Wolfenstein was the first project I had in C instead of assembler. I had the source code for the SNES version and after a month of tearing my hair out I realised there was a bug in the C compiler/linker. I don’t think anyone believed me and they sent someone from the software supplier with the intention he would show me where I was going wrong. He sat beside me. I had on my screen the source and object code and I showed him the error. He said ‘Oh!’ Anyway they fixed the problem. The SNES code was really good. It compiled and ran on the Sega with little trouble and then all I had to do was code the final rendering and audio which took only a few weeks. It was a long time ago and I’ve no idea why it was never released.

Interview with Paul Carruthers:

Q)You ended up working on ‘Escape From L.A’ for Virgin, which was canned, so…what platforms was it due o, how far along did coding get? and why was it canned?

PS1.We hadn’t got very far at all when it was cancelled. I got the impression that early screenings of the movie had shown it wasn’t going to be a huge success!

Q) Moving onto your time at Climax next, you were handed the Dreamcast conversion of N64 Turok The Dinosaur Hunter (something i’d loved to have of seen), again i wonder just how far along coding got/why it was canned and how you felt seeing yet another project cancelled?

Coding never even got started on that game. Canning games before they start or very early into production isn’t a problem and it’s quite common.

I did a Gameboy version of Xor that never saw the light of day!

Interview with Andy Satterthwaite, developer and producer on many games such as Wipeout 2097, Colony Wars, N-GEN Racing, Quantum Redshift:

Colony Wars had actually been in development for about a year when I was finishing on 2097 … it had been developed in the Psygnosis US office, but it was struggling and the team was brought back to Liverpool. […] My recollection of when I first saw the game was of a cube-like spaceship floating in space not doing very much; a gargantuan design document and a schedule that said the team had to do 170 hour days to get it finished. […] We cut the number of missions in half, re-scripted the game, made it wonderful etc. etc.

Q14)You then were signed up by Microsoft to do 2 (?) titles for the Xbox, yet we only ever saw 1, the fantastic Quantum Redshift, could you detail how you came to be working for MS, how they were to work with in terms of pro’s and cons etc?

I believe the game sold about 250,000 copies despite the good reviews; Microsoft said they didn’t get out of bed for less than 500K units, so they no longer wanted the sequel

Wii Speed Racer, I believe the game did quite well though; we actually did produce a demo on PS3 too … that would have been beyond awesome; but the lack of film success nailed that coffin shut.

Top unreleased stuff that I can think of:  “Storm Chaser” – something we were pitching during the death of Curly Monsters, A combo of disaster sim, racing/chasing game & pokemon-snap, as you try to take the best photos of twisters destroying stuff.

“Racing Life” – a whole horse ownership/management/racing RPG – this was actually designed with no intention of release, but at the time to get a PS3 dev license you had to get Sony concept approval on a full boxed title, so this was my “full boxed title” that got us that license (and then allowed us to make GripShift as a PSN download)

“Space” – a PSP mobile friendly Elite-like space game

“Arena Soccer” – an indoor soccer game (basically I want to make a 5-a-side Sensible Soccer for mobile, if anyone will let me !)

“Spy Hunter” – an epic reinvention of the midway classic, which Warner Bros were interested in – but not interested enough.

An interview with Neil Casini

3D Lemmings actually started life as a puzzle game that was created by James Thomas and Martin Hall working under the name Lunatic Software. They were already working for Psygnosis (they did a fantastic job of porting Wiz’n’Liz to the Amiga) and I believe during a code review, someone said could this be reworked to make lemmings in 3D? The idea stuck and the project was green-lit.

Batman Begins for E.A: We were really up against it actually. Initially we thought just two sections would be quite easy but EA wanted each section to last about 10 minutes. On full boost, the Batmobile travelled about 200mph. So for a section to last 10 minutes we had to build about 30 miles of track! All of a sudden we had a mountain to climb. I remember the levels really testing the game engine to the max but I think they turned out pretty well and were a welcome change to the slow pace of the main game. In actual fact, some of the takedown mechanics and ideas were borrowed for the next version of Burnout so I was pretty pleased to hear that!

Dead Space Extraction : Originally, it was meant to be an on-rails shooter very similar to Sega’s The House of the Dead; a very loose story, no cutscenes as such… just shoot, shoot, shoot. This is until we delivered our first vertical slice (a snapshot of what the final game could look like so execs can understand what they are getting and officially green light the completion of the project). Based on what they saw, EA elevated the status to AAA over night and from that point on, everything changed.

There is one game that will be of particular interest to you and your readers. I worked on a prototype for a Next Gen Contra. Eurocom was in talks with Konami and another internal team had made an attempt at a visual style but it didn’t go anywhere, they gave me a crack at it. I threw it all away (sorry lads!) and started from scratch, focusing in on the fundamental mechanics of a run’n’gun game. I decided to take inspiration from Geometry Wars and utilise a twin-stick control system whereby you steered your character with the left stick and aimed and fired your gun with the right stick. It had a semi-auto lock-on that meant you just pointed the stick towards the enemy and it would handle the vertical aiming for you. It meant that we could author the camera to keep the action on screen and always look dramatic while you just jumped around looking cool. We thought it was awesome. As did the Konami producer when he came to see the demo. Sadly, we didn’t get the contract. We were gutted. It’s a game that I’d still love to make one day.

Interview with Will Harbison:

A) When you have been in this business as long as i have you’ll find that a lot of projects fall by the wayside, for example I was in the process of working on an isometric Simpsons game while working at Ocean for the Atari ST and Amiga. That is one that i would have liked to have seen through to the end. Another game that got canned at the last minute was while i was working for a company called Malibu Comics who were soon to be bought by Marvel. The game was based on one of their superhero characters called Prime and was going to be a side scrolling, platform beat-em-up. I still have some graphics for that project. More recently I was working on a golf game starring Spongebob Squarepants and various other characters from the show. The game was pretty much complete but the plug was pulled right at the last minute.

A scan for the cancelled Playstation version of Alien VS Predator, released for the Jaguar.

Interview with Dave Taylor, former ID Software employee that worked on both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for Atari Jaguar:

Dave Taylor: I don’t recall Quake even being a brain fart of an idea on the Jaguar. I seem to recall that Wolf or Doom or both actually sold at a better than 1:1 ratio with the system for a while, and even at that stupendous sales ratio, I think we still did some pathetic number of sales, like a couple hundred thousand units tops, which with cartridge margins is super not worth the suffering. Between that and all the dev suffering, neither of us was like, “Oh goodie, let’s do some more of that!”

Dave Taylor: Golgotha (PC) was canceled after we ran out of money and went to the public domain. Bits of it were re-used for years in lots of things.  Worked on an educational math game I was quite excited about a year and change back written in coffeescript running under node.js, and that was a lot of fun, but I lost the original coder to burn-out (from previous work) and couldn’t finish it under my own steam. Not sure what became of that, but as I was the only one working on it at the end and had written most of the gameplay code, I imagine it’s still on ice.

Mick West Interview:

 Q6)ROTOX was planned for the ill-fated Konix Multi-System and indeed work had started on it (i’ve seen youtube footage of it). It was also said to make use of the systems hydraulic chair. Were you directly involved with the Konix version and if so, what were your thoughts on the Konix hardware and it’s chances in the marketplace, had it been released?

A6) I only briefly saw the Konix, then Binary Design went bankrupt and laid everyone off. There was some shady re-organization, and they re-emerged as Creative Materials. So I never got to use the Konix. I never actually saw Rotox on it, but just now looked it up on Youtube (on the “Konix Multisystem – Prototype Footage” video). It does not look like they got very far with it.  It was an interesting console, I’m really not sure how it would have done though. Hard to break into a large market with only a marginal improvement. Probably they lacked money.

Q12)Can you shed light on any of the unfinished games (on any platform) you either assisted with or wrote yourself….and how did it feel to see such hard work go down the pan?.

A12) Neversoft had quite a few. There was a Ghost Rider game, which was kind of like a Castlevania game. It got canceled as Crystal Dynamics were going through some re-organization. I can’t say we had time to mourn it,  as we immediately went into overdrive writing demos, trying to get work elsewhere. We did an futuristic racing game, a rally race game, a golf game, and a mech 3rd person shooter called “Big Guns“, which we eventually got Sony to let us do, and at about the same time landed the MDK gig. Big Guns was a fun game, but it kind of got designed out of existence by the Sony Producer, and eventually was cancelled. That’s a shame, but then that led to Apocalypse and hence Tony Hawk, so it’s all good.

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Clockwerk is a cancelled puzzle platformer game, which was in development at Next Level Games; the creators of the Super Mario Strikers games, as well as the unreleased Super Mario Spikers. The title was planned to be worked on for multiple unspecified home console platforms during mid-late 2011 (believed to be Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3) , but was never produced.

Two Grumpy Old Men Who Just Want To Retire

The project began towards the start of 2011 and was being worked on in tandem with Next Level’s other main undertaking at the time, which was Captain America: Super Soldier for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

A poster created for the pitch of Clockwerk.

It was conceived as the story of two old men, Otto & Herman, who work as Hausmeisters (caretakers) in a magical floating clock tower suspended in the clouds called ‘The World Clock’, that governs the flow of time throughout the universe. On their final day before retirement, a faction of evil gremlins attack the tower, dismantling its innards and disrupting the behaviour of time. In order for the grumpy twosome to finally retire, they must defeat the invaders and repair its inner workings.

“This massive floating cuckoo clock was the stage where the story of Clockwerk was to play out. The clock tower was surrounded by a quaint Bavarian style village (elements of which can be seen in the lower right), perched on a circle of clouds, where the retired Hausmeisters spent out their remaining days relaxing and reminiscing about old times.” – Derek Stenning, concept artist.

The Would-be Mechanics

Although the artists involved with the project declined to comment on whether or not the game was intended to be in 3D or 2D, one of them did reveal to us that it would have been “a puzzle platformer with combat elements“. One of the central hooks of the gameplay was that the two protagonists could pull a cord on each of their suits (named “schutzanzugs”) to inflate them. The entirety of traversal in Clockwerk would have been built around this mechanic. Herman & Otto could then ride the clock’s internal railings by rolling or use their ability to float for a limited period of time.

An Original IP by Next Level Games

In the beginning, Next Level had no publisher attached to the project. It had been an entirely original creation from several of the studio’s designers and artists, as part of an ongoing effort by the company to work on more ambitious IP’s.  It was never prototyped, but the team produced a plethora of conceptual documents for the game to pitch it to various publishers. These included detailed character bios, such as the ones seen above.

In addition, a variety of concepts for the title’s gremlin foes were put together. The enemy types included “sorcerers” and bomb-wielding “saboteurs”.

“Bird of Prey” Gremlins:

“As one of the main travel mechanics was to roll around, these little guys would cling together to form large “Grem-balls” and unevenly (and painfully) roll around on the rails within the World Clock.”

“Sorcerer type”:

“The Sorcerer type Gremlin was used to command lesser Gremlin types and could conduct various spells and other ranged attacks. He could also transform into energy and used his gear amulet to enter the mechanical workings of the World Clock.”

“Saboteur type”:

“The Saboteur Gremlin type would operate in advance of the main Gremlin invasion force damaging Hausmeister equipment and defences.”

“Leadership types”:

 “A page outlining the two leadership strains in Gremlin society, the more modern Officer class and the old priesthood, here represented by the Magus.”

Back To The Drawing Board

After a few months of experimenting with various ideas in pre-production, Next Level began to pitch Clockwerk to various publishing partners. Although developers are tight-lipped as to which publisher in particular it was, sources close to the company say that it was picked up by a “major company” in July. For a short while, the developers collaborated with this third party, working to refine the aesthetics of the game before prototyping.

Their publisher was uncertain of certain aspects of the concepts shown above; chiefly, the appearances of the main characters. The management reportedly requested slight redesigns of the elderly duo in order to make them more appealing to their target audience. To accomplish this, Next Level’s artists experimented, drawing up one of the protagonists with varying degrees of “realism”. From left to right, the image below demonstrates these style tests, as thy got gradually more cartoonish.

They had also started to tweak the designs of some of the gremlins:

A Spanner In The Works

By mid July, Next Level Gams had finalised their designs for the heroic Hausmeisters, but their efforts were not to be realised. According to artist, Derek Stenning, it was discovered that another team within the publisher had been working on a separate game with very similar gameplay mechanics. This had happened completely independently of Next Level’s project in an unfortunate coincidence. As such, the publisher then ended their plans to produce Clockwerk and the project was cancelled in its entirety.

 The final redesigns before cancellation:

 

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Danganronpa is one of the best hidden gaming gems for PSVita owners. Originally released only in Japan as 2 PSP games in 2010 (Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc) and 2012 (Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair), thanks to the release of the PS Vita collection with both episodes in USA and Europe, western gamers were finally able to enjoy this bizarre Visual Novel. Before to be known with their final title “Danganronpa”, the project was in development for the PSP with a different title: Distrust.

The story behind the development of Distrust is more complex than what is generally supposed. Even if Spike Chunsoft released many images from the beta version of the game, they did not explained why the project was so heavily changed and some features from the original Distrust project were reused not only for Danganronpa, but also for another popular visual novel.

Danganronpa was originally published in late 2010 by Spike, just a year after they released 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors for the Nintendo DS, developed by  Chunsoft. 999 was released in English in 2010, where it soon became a cult hit among american visual novel fans, thanks to its gloomy and mysterious plot. Unfortunately it seems that in Japan it was not as well received. When it was first shown Distrust received better feedbacks from japanese gamers, but it seems that in its early development the game had much more similarities with 999.

A beta Execution in Distrust

It is difficult to say to what extent Danganronpa follows the original story of Distrust, but at least we know from these beta screens that the game already had both Class Trials and the resulting executions, as well as an ensemble of 15 characters. Both the drawings and the darker atmosphere of Distrust are in contrast to the more “colorful” Danganronpa. The colors in Distrust were much dirtier and the “Over the Top” executions that can be seen in Danganronpa were not implemented yet. Distrust had much more bloody deaths for the characters, such as the execution of a female protagonist through a guillotine (that does not happen in the final game). The poor girl here, killed by the guillotine, could have been a beta version of Kyoko Kirigiri or Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa.

It seems that Spike and Chunsoft had some disagreements about the style of the game. After a while the design of the characters and the color of the blood were changed.

On the left Beta Distrust, on the right Beta Danganronpa

According to the developers, they have changed the color of the blood to pink in Danganronpa to keep the age-ratings down, but in the end it was a good stylistic choice that perfectly matched the final style of Danganronpa. Even with a pink blood, CERO (the Japanese entertainment rating organization) gave a D rating to the first Danganronpa, so the game could have only be sold to buyers of 17+ years old. The second episode had a C rating, for 15+ years old gamers. Ratings of CERO are often regarded as very random.

If you look at the beta cover for Distrust, it seems that the game already had a D rating from the CERO, so violence and blood could not have been the main reasons for the drastic changes that evolved the game into Danganronpa.

There was a Trust / Distrust mechanic in Distrust

A feature that was changed in Danganronpa is the “Trust / Distrust” system. While we can make our choice in the Hope / Despair in Danganronpa, Distrust was all about trust and distrust. This game mechanics was much more complex than the one in Danganronpa. Something that is missing in Danganronpa (which is also relatively unusual for Visual Novels) are tough decisions that change the course of the story and lead to many different routes and endings. Only once, and only at the end of the game, you are able to make such a decision in Danganronpa, even if it have little effect on the plot. The Trust / Distrust system would have allowed players to gain the trust or the resentment of the other characters. Under this system, different murders and routes would have happened in the game. If one won the trust of a character, they would act as allies in the following investigation. It’s interesting to notice that the Trust / Distrust system was reused in Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, the sequel to 999.

The Rhythm Minigame that can be found during Trials parts in Danganronpa was already implemented in Distrust, as we can see in the left Screenshot.

Design of the characters in the beta version was changed often to find the more popular one, but in their final designs, Distrust  characters kinda resemble their appearances in Danganronpa. Character designer Rui Komatsuzaki stated in the official artbook (in which we can find many interesting unused artworks) how difficult it was to find the designs of the main characters. The first characters that were designed for Danganronpa were Sayaka Maizono and Leon Kuwata, from which he then created all the other designs. These two characters seem to have already been finalized in Distrust and in these beta screens Sayaka and Leon are the only ones that are almost identical in the final game.

Other characters like Byakuya Togami, Hifumi Yamada and Toko Fukawa have since been drastic changed. Even the main “antogonist” of the game, Monokuma, was much, MUCH different in its beta version.

Final characters:

Beta Characters:

Final Monokuma:

Beta Monokuma:

Design of Hope’s Peak Academy was quite different and in Distrust it looked more like a dirty warehouse.

Danganronpa, a game about executions, had many executions itself. We don’t know the official reasons for all these changes from the beta version (Distrust) to the final one (Danganronpa), but we can speculate that Spike Chunsoft decided to make these shifts to differentiate the game from “999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors”, that was not enough popular in Japan. We wonder how Distrust would have been played, with the different characters, an abandoned / dirtier school, more violent executions and different gameplay mechanics, with new plot lines and new endings.

Another huge change in the beta version was the 7 days time limit. Unfortunately we don’t know much about how this could have been used in the game.

A few easter egg remain from the early version of the game, as a well-known music track from Danganronpa that grant its title from the original project.

Only a single beta video from Distrust still exists, that shows all its little details and distinct features. Even if the characters shown in this beta video are not the exact same as the ones in Danganronpa, do not watch this if you have not finished the game, to avoid spoilers.

Original article written by Aufziehvogel in german, english translation and updates by monokoma! Thanks to Dengeki Playstation for the screenshots, GameFAQs users &  Jeuxvideo. If you notice more differences or if you own the Danganronpa artbook and can find some other interesting beta designs, let us know in the comments below!

Images:

 

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Farstar is a cancelled Playstation space combat simulator which Teknocrest, an american software house, was working on in 1994 on Taito’s behalf. Just like Brimstone and Lufia for Genesis / Megadrive, however, the project got never completed. Fortunately, the programmer that was developing it preserved a video of the game:

Here’s some footage of a Playstation game called “Farstar” that I was working on back in 1994, I think Taito was planning to release it as “Starship Fantasy” or something like that, it was even listed in Famitsu as coming soon for a time.

It was supposed to be a mix of Wing Commander/Star Trek/Starflight. At least, that’s what I was trying to make. It was pretty ambitious for its time…maybe too ambitious.

Anyway as you can see it’s pretty shitty and was cancelled. I guess I just wasn’t a very good programmer back then…

For more informations check the topic on opa-ages.

Images:

Video:

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Driver 5 is a cancelled racing game which was, for a short period of time, in the works at Sumo Digital, the developer of the Sonic & All-Stars Racing games. It would have been published by Ubisoft and released around early 2011 on Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii.

In January 2010, Ubisoft released a financial forecast for their next fiscal year, detailing a number of their scheduled releases. Among these were some vague plans to release an untitled fifth entry to the Driver series, although no other information was provided at the time. Behind the scenes, it was around this point that Driver 5 (a working title) was in pre-production at Sumo Digital, who had been contracted externally. Previously, Sumo had partnered with Ubisoft to produce Driver ’76 on the PSP, who they worked on alongside Ubisoft Reflections.

Concept art for Driver 5.

Christian Bravery of design studio, Lighting Lights, was brought on board to draft concept art for the Driver 5 project.

“It was interesting to be involved at the beginning and the end of this project and something I’d love to do more often.”

The lifespan of Sumo Digital’s Driver 5 was brief, as it never moved past pre-production. It was cancelled when Ubisoft elected not to partner with Sumo Digital on it, instead giving the project to Ubisoft Reflections. Reflections would then go on to create Driver: San Francisco.

By the looks of it, this original vision for the game would have incorporated destructible environments of some sort. The concepts show Tanner’s surroundings crumbling around him as he races away from his pursuers. Perhaps this was a small stepping stone towards Sonic & All Stars Racing: Transformed, which incorporated a similar concept of tracks that would dynamically change and fall apart as the race progressed.

 

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Ragnarok Online II: The Gate Of The World was the sequel of the popular MMORPG Ragnarok Online, in development by Gravity and Team Mercury. After entering a closed beta testing phase in 2006 and continuing through 2010 in Korean open beta testing, the game was reworked multiple times due to its poor initial reception. The game itself was created with the Unreal Engine 2.5, giving the game an nice Anime-looking graphic. The Gate Of The World was planned for have 3 different races: Norman (Humans) Ellr (Sort of Super deformed style character) and the Dimago (Sort of Pale Humans who featured a stylish combat style).

Ragnarok Online 2 featured even a changeable job system, making player to be able to change job in any town. The jobs available in the Beta(s) were: Novice, Swordsman, Thief, Clown, Soldier and Magician. Gate Of The World was scrapped for create Ragnarok Online II: The Legend Of The Second, who ironically closed in Korea in 2011 because there were not enough players.

Article by Deifor

Images:

Videos:

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With January’s donations from our patrons and other awesome people, this month we have reached our $300 goal to pay the servers for 2015! We are super happy to be able to keep the site online for another year with the help of our readers and friends and would like to thank you all for the support!

We also reached our second goal on Patreon, meaning Tamaki will create more Unseen64 Podcasts for all our patrons as a big “thank you!” for their help. There are some more goals in our Patreon page, as the creation of better documentary videos for beta & cancelled videogames, and even if we are still far away from the $250 goal to fully work on the Unseen64 Book, we are already starting to do some early organization for its content. You can give us your feedback about what you would like to see in the U64 Book in our forum.

Donations will now be put aside to pay the server for the next year too ($300) and when we’ll be financially secure enough to keep Unseen64 online in 2016, we can then hopefully start to work more on the Unseen64 Book.

If you have suggestions and feedbacks, let us know in the comments below! :)

With <3, the Unseen64 Staff 

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