Gaming
Games
The tragically cancelled games that never were
The blockbusters that shoulda woulda coulda been made.
Fez 2
© Red Bull UK
Games are big business, but it’s a sad fact of business that not every project makes it to market. Studios go under, publishers get cold feet, or games just take so long that the plug gets pulled on them before they can hit shelves.
Sometimes, the creators themselves give up work on a project: just last month high profile indie developer Phil Fish cancelled Polytron’s eagerly awaited puzzle platformer Fez II after an argument with a journalist on Twitter took an unpleasant turn. “I am done. I take the money and I run. This is as much as I can stomach,” he cryptically wrote on the Polytron website.
It’s a bitter blow for fans of one of the most critically acclaimed indie games of the last few years, but sadly far from unusual. Gaming history’s littered with should-have-beens and tantalising titles that were never realised: here are just a few of the the tragically cancelled games we wish we could be playing today.
The Getaway 3
Grand Theft Auto’s inspired many imitators and rivals, but none so gripping as Sony’s The Getaway series on PlayStation 2, which let you explore and cause havoc in a vast digital recreation of London town, complete with cockneys, yardies and triads all muscling it out for a bit of the action. A sequel, The Getaway: Black Monday, followed the original 2002 game two years later, but a third outing on the PlayStation 3 never materialised, as developer SCE London Studio turned its efforts to SingStar and games for Sony’s EyeToy camera. "I would not say [The Getaway 3 has] been abandoned, just put to one side," SCEL producer Nicolas Doucet told reporters at the time. It’s been five years though, and nothing’s changed, so we suspect that it’s going to remain there.
Call of Duty: Devil’s Brigade
Call of Duty, meet Gears of War - that was the premise for the third-person shooter set in the Second World War, but was cancelled in 2007. Originally conceived under the codename “Call of Duty Action Adventure”, the game would have placed you and a squad in a huge open world game, but sadly before development could fully hit the final stages, publisher Activision pulled the plug in favour of the first Modern Warfare title, Call of Duty 4 - we can’t say they made the wrong choice for their investors, but we still can’t help but wonder what the shooter scene would look like today if they’d gone the very different route Devil’s Brigade presented.
DJ Hero 3
DJ Hero
© Red Bull UK
In the late 2000s, music rhythm games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero were the rockstars of the gaming world, letting you and your mates jam along to anthems old and new with controllers shaped like electric guitars, keyboard and even drum kits. Inevitably, Activision cashed in with a turntable take on the genre in 2009, DJ Hero, which came complete with its own colour coded mixing deck controller. A sequel followed in 2010, but like a needle suddenly yanked off a record, the bottom fell out of the market: people got bored, Guitar Hero sales plummeted, and Activision cancelled it and DJ Hero 3 along with it, a pity, given the warm reviews its predecessor received. We’ve still yet to see anyone successfully revive the music genre, but we hope Activision will eventually bring it back from the dead.
Fortress
Swedish games studio Grin, the team behind Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series on PC and 2009’s Bionic Commando remake, came up with a fantasy action role-playing game known as Fortress with a similar art style to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, reportedly epic in scale. It was pitched to various publishers, including Square Enix, the company behind Final Fantasy, who took an interest in the game’s fantasy Nordic universe, and even said that it would publish the title as a Final Fantasy XII spin-off - watch closely and you’ll see one of the series’ hallmark yellow chocobo birds in the concept footage above. Grin made changes to set the game in the world of Ivalice, the same setting as Final Fantasy XII, but Square Enix eventually grew less satisfied with the art style and the direction the game was heading, and subsequently pulled out from the project, leaving Grin to shut down. Not great.
TimeSplitters 4
Timesplitters was a first person shooter series that never took itself seriously, with liberal use of monkeys, time travel and other absurd gimmicks, and it gained a devoted following for it. Three hits followed in swift succession, and it wasn’t until developer Free Radical took its hand to a different FPS project, 2008’s abysmal Haze, that things took a turn for the worse. The studio was scooped up by Crysis creator Crytek to became Crytek UK, but that left the fourth TimeSplitters title ‘indefinitely postponed’, and it’s been that way since 2011.
Star Wars: Jedi Knight III
Sometimes it seems like there are more Star Wars games than stars in the galaxy, but few have inspired the same feverish devotion as the Jedi Knight series of first person shooters. Flying an X-Wing’s cool, but it’s not the same as walking around using the force on storm troopers, as LucasArts’ series of games let you do back in the 90s. A console spin-off, Jedi Academy, followed on PC and Xbox in 2003, but since then, nothing. Zilch. It wasn’t always going to be that way - recently published concept art revealed that George Lucas’ video games division was working on Jedi Knight III. But then Disney bought LucasFilm last year, Star Wars and everything with it, and turned the death star on LucasArts, which is sadly no more - and neither it appears is Jedi Knight III.
Fire Emblem 64
Way back in the 90s, Nintendo had lofty plans for its Nintendo 64 console, including a disc drive expansion known as the Nintendo 64DD that plugged into the underbelly of the console and took magneto-optical discs. Ultimately, it was a commercial failure, launching only in Japan late into the console’s lifespan in 1999, with few to no games. Medieval tactical roleplaying game Fire Emblem was one of the titles that was planned for the N64DD, but due to the the failure of the add-on, it was abruptly cancelled in 2000. No images or videos of the game have ever been released, so we can only imagine what might have been.
Killing Day
First revealed during Sony’s E3 conference in 2005, Killing Day was an Ubisoft first-person shooter set to hit both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. You were set to take the role of a rough-looking character armed with more pistols than teeth, taking on bad guys in cinematic shootouts with levels that crumble and explode around you, forcing you to constantly keep your wits about and keep moving. Sadly, the game was canned in the middle of development, although not all hope is lost: in January of this year, Ubisoft filed a trademark application for the game’s name, but there’s been no news since. Fingers crossed we see some life in it soon.
Dirty Harry
“Do you feel lucky, punk?” The developers at The Collective certainly did when they set out to create a video game sequel to Clint Eastwood’s classic 1971 film. Could a gritty crime adventure follow up to a film made before most PS3 and Xbox 360 owners were even born really turn a profit? For a while, it looked like the answer was yes: Eastwood signed on to provide voice acting for the game, and it reached a stage where the team were happy to show off the game in public. In a mysterious twist even Harry himself couldn’t solve however, publisher Warner Bros got cold feet, and the game was tragically axed in 2007.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned
Disney might have sithed LucasArts out of existence, but its approach to games of movies has become much more savvy in recent years, letting studios take their time to get the game right, not rush it out the door in time for release at the cinema. Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned was set to be one of those games, an adventure in its own right with its own open world (or sea) to explore, huge galleys to man and upgrade, and a story separate from the movie franchise. Sadly, Disney laid off the team at Propaganda Games during restructuring, leaving only a skeleton crew to finish its other project, the game of Tron: Evolution. If you ask us, they backed the wrong horse. Or ship.
