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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.""
... I don't think the Vulcans would have much of a feeling about Vulcan Fury. It wouldn't be logical. The title doesn't make much sense either.
-Rusty
You never know...
I always have great plans to make some sweet ass game. As a programming student i get myself way in over my head and end up scratching it long before it becomes playable. Typical problem or not organizing and shooting too high.
It makes me think that i dont wanna do coding as a living becuase if i actually did make progress and someone cancled my work it would not be very fun at all.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.""
They forgot Duke Nukem Forever
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
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...
Some would say that Ultima IX was never finished...
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
It seems like such a waste having all those resources put into games just to have the it scraped in the end. Why doesn't the game developing community just make the unfinished code open-source and set up a sourceforge project around it :-) i could imagine some pretty cool games coming about this way.
--david
There's no mention of PC based Halo (bought by the great Satan to promote a substandard console...'nother story tho'), Mac OS9 ports of Half-Life, OSX ports of everything, Linux ports of Starcraft/DiabloII/DeusEx, etc... At the risk of sounding a troll, compared to these titles, I could care less about those listed in the article. Interesting read nonetheless.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
I still remember the B5 space combat sim being deep-sixed by Sierra. Too bad, as it looked like a good game in the making with something close to realistic physics.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
We might be able to add this one to the list. It looks like this will (unfortunately) be vaporware and only live on through fan-created fiction...
A shame 'cause it is truly a great franchise.
Games getting cancelled happens all the time in the console games world too, it seems. Luckily, on consoles, it is common for a prototype or two to survive.
:-(
Take Earthbound 0, for example. Some of you may remember the SNES game Earthbound, but it comes from a NES game known as Mother in Japan. Nintendo of America finished translating the game but never released it. Fortunatley, it has been dumped.
Countless prototype games have been dumped that may never have been able to see their light of day. Recently, Star Fox 2 for the SNES was dumped too.
Unfortunatley, playing these dumps is illegal as is distributing them.
Also, I wish some prototypes would surface for my favorite console, the Virtual Boy!
Overall, my eyes are dry. With the exception of Secret Of Vulcan Fury, all the other games were cancelled or died for good reason. I'd much rather have a cemetery full of unreleased poopy games than a shelf full of them.
what about descent 4?
the earlier descent games were fabulous
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
was when the text-parser was axed. Adventure games lost the most of their expressiveness and became a game of "Click all the current screens with all your current items to advance" whenever you got stuck, because in the end, that was your only way of interacting with the environment. Maniac Mansion style games were a bit better, but were still a long way off of text-parser style action. Parsers gave the game authors so much more flexibility as to what could be done, and gave the player so much more to do and explore, that there isn't really any comparison between the games of yore and all the rodent infested ones that came after ^_^;
Or maybe it's just me...
I would imagine that most game companies re-use alot of their code. And they probably have a good ammount of their own intelectiual property tied up in there. Also many of them probably licence code from 3rd parties that they can't re-licence themselves.
Hacker Media
(1) Sierra was creating Middle Earth MMORPG for several years before scrapping it. It couldn't straddle the Old and New Sierra eras (the latter being an era where Sierra Doesn't Exist, from the point of view of an old timer).
(2) Worldplay Games spent millions making Cyberpark, an online MMORPG and virtual environment. The project was bought by AOL which eventually cancelled it. The technology was functional and could house thousands of people, but which floundered over business model concerns at AOL and a related lack of direction. I still don't think that the current MMORPG have as good of a hosting architecture... but I'm biased.
Indeed, this is the frustrating thing about the game industy, there is a ton of work thrown away or spoiled.
-pyrrho
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.
I know a lot of RPG geeks are awaiting a new game in the Lunar series and are still wanting to know if all plans for Lunar 3 are cancelled, or if there will one day be a new Lunar game.
There has been rumor after rumor regarding Lunar 3. After Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete came out for Playstation in the US, there were statements coming from both Game Arts (the Japanese makers of Lunar) and Working Designs (who localized the Lunar games for the Sega CD and PS) that we would soon see work beginning on Lunar 3, probably for the Playstation 2.
It has been 2 years since Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete has come out, and no new information can be obtained about Lunar 3. Working Designs has been silent about the issue, and there doesn't seem to be anything from Game Arts on it.
Lunar Legends for GBA is translated by UbiSoft (probably because WD doesn't have the lisence to do GBA games), but that is a remake of Lunar 1, not a sequel.
It seems like Lunar 3 would be an instant hit, but both Working Designs and Game Arts have been silent about it.
About two weeks ago I saw a message regarding Lunar Legends on the Working Designs message board. It was explained that Working Designs had sold the rights to some of their original Lunar content back to Game Arts (Working designs apparently owned the rights to some of the things they did in their localization, including the name of the White Dragon, Quark) so that this stuff could be included in the US GBA version of Lunar Legend.
Someone on the board asked if this transfer of the rights meant there would be no Lunar 3, to which I did not see an answer.
What was not clear to me was if Working Designs had really SOLD the rights to these things back to Game Arts, or if they had LISENCED these things.
I'm really starting to believe that Game Arts has perhaps abandonded the idea of making Lunar 3. If Game Arts really has abandoned the idea of Lunar 3, then it explains why Working Designs would easily want to sell back otherwise useless IP for some quick cash.
I hope that this is not the case, but it seems like it may be.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
To read the story of the missing LSL4 game straight from the developer's (Al Lowe) mouth, check out Lesiure Suit Larry 4 and Why Larry 5?.
Fairly interesting story -- What was supposed to be LSL4, ended up morphing into The Sierra Network, and then getting sold to AT&T for $100 million (and then getting resold to AOL for $10 million).
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.
SimsVille was a cross between The Sims and Sim City. It offered both a macroscopic view of a town where you could manage Sim life on a neighborhood level and a microscopic one where you could manage Sims and families (although not as granular as you can in The Sims). It died a horrible death sometime in 2001 after Maxis decided it conflicted with what they were already doing with The Sims, Sim City and the upcoming Sims Online. Apparently it was pretty much in a pre-release stage but who knows if anyone will ever see it.
liB
Yeah, I haven't purchased a Sierra game since the B5:ITF game was killed. I can't help but get a little mean glow inside thinking that Sierra killed the Lord of the Rings game at the same time, and LOTR has become one of the hottest licensing properties around. They blew the chance to make A LOT of money because they had their heads of their asses. Sierra shitcanned the B5 team and the LOTR team on the same day. I hope the developers feel a bit vindicated.
As a B5 fan it pisses me off that the last performances of these actors in their roles will never be seen. As a gamer I relly wanted a top notch Starfury flight sim.
Fuck Sierra. Fuck them right in the ear.
Don't forget Battlecruiser 3000!!!
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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
Taoism
The crazy reason why the Aeon Flux video game was cancelled was the demise of Viacom Interactive. However, the game was a piece of crap. Bad controls! Bad, bad! ;-)
Also, around that time, a game called "Tomb Raider" came out. TR basically was what the AF video game should have been, without the kink factor.
Simon And Schuster/MTV Networks should have bought the Tomb Raider engine and redid the AF game as a TR mod. However, since the AF series was cancelled after only one season (just like MTV did to Downtown, alas...) I'm sure it was commercially moot by then.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.