Amped was once a highly successful snowboarding series. After releasing Amped 3 in late 2005, developer Indie Built was busily working on Amped 4 and Links 2007. Both games were cancelled when the studio was closed in April 2006.
While the Amped series was formerly exclusive to Microsoft consoles, Amped 4 was going to be published on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Major additions included a resort community and technical improvements.
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Shadowrun: the Awakening is a cancelled game in the Shadowrun series of RPGs, that was in development by FASA Studios for the Xbox 360 and PC, before the released Shadowrun 2007. This unreleased version had a full single player mode and FASA worked on their own 3D engine for the project. Sometime later, the art director was changed for unknown reasons and they scrapped “The Awakening” project to work on the new Shadowrun, that became a multiplayer only title. It’s currently unknown why this version was completely canned with the change of director or why the single player mode was removed from Shadowrun 2007. We can speculate that some problems in the development and management of the original Shadowrun: The Awakening project lead to the decision to create a “simpler” FPS, based around the online multiplayer.
It’s interesting to notice that initial gameplay prototyping of the new multiplayer-only Shadowrun was done using the HALO engine. Check the Shadowrun-Halo prototype page for some screens.
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
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Tiberium is a cancelled tactical FPS set in the Command & Conquer universe, that was in development by EA Los Angeles (EALA) and it had been in production for two years. Tiberium was cancelled on September 30, 2008 due to the game’s failure to meet “quality standards set by the development team and the EA Games label”. [Infos from Wikipedia]
You can read more about the cancellation at Kotaku.
Thanks to Robert Seddon and Drake Lake for the contribution!
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Our nice friends Robert Seddon and Batzarro have linked us to an intersting news that was spotted on Game Set Watch and Gamasutra, that talks about the find of some screenshots from “Titan Project”, an HALO inspired Massive Multiplayer Online game that was in development at Ensemble Studios, but was cancelled in 2007.
Ensemble Studios has recently closed (for financial problems?) after they had finished to work on Halo Wars and a supposed former employer of the team has started to share screens and some infos about the cancelled games that he worked on. On his Flickr Account we can see a wonderfull collection of images from Titan, and on his blog we can read that: “In 2005 Ensemble Studios completed Age of Empires III. Following that, several game prototypes (a major one was ‘Wrench’, more at a later point) were developed. One of them was a Halo inspired MMO codenamed Titan; cancelled after around two years in June 2007.”
Do you remember Donkey Kong Racing for the GameCube? When Rare was sold to Microsoft in 2002, they also announced a racing title. As they could no longer use the Donkey Kong characters, rumours appeared saying that the game was being reworked into a racer starring Rare’s own Sabreman.
In 2003, Microsoft trademarked the title “Sabreman Stampede“, it appeared as if there was the final confirmation. In March 2004, Rare answered the following in their Scribes when asked whether Donkey Kong Racing was still alive:
“Well, yes and no. It’s not called Donkey Kong Racing any more, it’s not for the GameCube any more and by this point I’d imagine so little of the original art and code remains that it’s barely even the same game any more, but yes, it’s still coming out. In some form. Wait and see, if you haven’t already picked up on the new title that’s been unofficially floating around the electrical interweb for months now.”
It was not until 2008 that we saw how much the game had changed as an unanonymous poster leaked a video on Youtube (you can find it in our gallery beneath). Developed by a team of which many worked on Starfox Adventures or Jet Force Gemini, Sabreman Stampede had evolved from a racer into a full adventure. One could hardly notice that it had started out as Donkey Kong Racing.
In late 2004 it was decided to port both Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero from Xbox to Xbox 360. As the Kameo team did not have enough resources, members of the “Sabreman Team“, as such they were later credited, were asked to help out. However, this also meant that Sabreman Stampede had to be put on hold, even though porting and reworking it for a Xbox 360 release had already begun. After six years Sabreman Stampede was cancelled. Having started out as a Diddy Kong Racing successor, evolving into a title in which you were riding herds and then becoming an adventure game, its development was stopped due to a lack of focus in design.
As we can read in an interview with Lee Musgrave:
Donkey Kong Racing was obviously pretty heavily tied to Nintendo as a franchise, and as Rare approached the finalization of a buyout deal with Microsoft it was clear that the game had no future, at least with the ape’s as characters. We switched it around to be a Sabreman game, and there was a great early Xbox prototype – but someone, somewhere decreed that it was a little too old-school for the kind of ‘revolutionary gaming experiences’ that the Xbox was capable of delivering, and so it started down a path of meandering changes, updates and ‘evolution’ that finally saw it run out of steam and fall over. There were some great ideas in the game as it developed though, and I still look back to the early racing game design and think we could have done something great with that.
This was all vaporware until July 2008, when Transparentjinjo added a video of the Xbox 360 prototype on his YouTube channel. It seems that Stampede had a long and interesting development history, that sadly ended in a cancellation. Even if we will never be able to play the game, we are happy that some proof of Sabreman Stampede’s existence can be preserved!
Special thanks to Transparentjinjo.
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