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Unfinished Adventures
Obiwan Kenobi writes "Just Adventure has an interesting article on unfinished games that were nixed in mid-development. Amongst the casualties are incomplete trilogies, an off beat 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game, Blizzard's ill-fated Warcraft Adventures and the Star Trek title "Secret of Vulcan Fury.""
Actually, while everything they said about Warcraft Adventures was true, they did leave out one bit of information: the storyline was too important to the Warcraft mythos to drop entirely. Warcraft Adventures was later reworked and became the book Lord of the Clans by Christie Golden. The events of the book are also referenced in the orcs' backstory in Warcraft III.
Just my $.02...
You obviously don't know your Vulcan history. In the time before Surak, Vulcans were an emotional and extremely destructive species (similar to the Romulans). Surak was able to bring logic and peace to his people but only by burying all emotion.
I'm not sure why the parent currently has a score of 3, Duke Nukem Forever HAS NOT been cancelled. A simple check of 3D Realm's site [www.3drealms.com] shows that it has not been cancelled, although they do joke about the "when it's done" thing extensively.
The Sierra chick came in and was showing me some stuff they were working on - a little rendered (Actual Game Screens!) movie about a game called Outpost. It was supposed to be the end-all of simulation/strategy/resource management games. It looked really cool, and the Sierra chick told me about all the things you were going to be able to do in it.
A couple of years passed, and Outpost finally came out. PC Gamer reamed it a new one, and so did this guy. All the features I heard and looked forward to were gone. In their place, a sterile, unfun, buggy pile.
Outpost 2 came out to much better reviews, and there was talk of Outpost 3, but as all the links to it are dead, I believe that this may go in the 'Unfinished Adventures' catagory.
I worked at Interplay at the time of Secret of Vulcan Fury.
:)
DeForest Kelly was too ill by the time of the voice recording to actual record his lines. He never did record SoVF dialogue. They used a voice actor in his place.
The main reason SoVF was cancelled was:
a) Not enough progress had been made on the game due to a couple changes of directions in the design, change in management on the project and the typical delays associated with game development.
b) Budgetary reasons and the decline of the adventure game market. They had spent millions on the project, and it needed millions more to be completed (mostly due to art: lots and lots of animation time, and lots of rendering time). They did a basic P&L (profit and loss statement) and the project was not going to make money.
As cool as the project was, Interplay could not afford to develop a game that would automatically lose money over games that would only potentially lose money...
pax,
-Chris