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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
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...
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.
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.
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'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.
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).
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.
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