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Games That Could Have Been
Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."
In the last idea they say they have the code there, they were demoing it to publishers and stuff... Why not just open source the code and let the community run with it?
If the idea was dropped, if there is no way you're gonna get that game published and make money from it, why waste all those man-hours than went into producing that prototype and instead open source it and let people have fun with it.