Raiders is a cancelled project in the Tomb Raider series, that would have been developed for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC as a coop multiplayer spin-off, before Crystal Dynamics decided to instead working on Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Raiders’ concept was heavily different from The Guardian of Light, as it would have been much more similar to the original Tomb Raider games, with third person exploration, platforming and shooting combat.
The story focused on the clones of Lara Croft, known as the Doppelgangers. It’s currently unclear if players would use these Doppelgangers as their playable characters, or if they were the main enemies. In the end the game was canned in pre-production, when they just had some concept made with placeholder graphic and some gameplay ideas to pitch to the studio managers.
While the game was never announced by Eidos nor Crystal Dynamics, fans of the series found documents of the project online, preserving its existence from being forgotten.
Showdown: Scorpion is a cancelled FPS in development around 2005 by B-Cool Interactive, planned to be published by Akella for PC in 2007. It was set in a cyberpunk future, where you could use guns, technology and even paranormal skills to fight your way against sci-fi soldiers and zombie-alike monsters.
“Tucked away on the E3 showroom floor was Scorpion: Showdown, a first-person shooter from Akella. Set in the 2040s, this game puts you behind the sights of about 15 weapons and sets you lose on a land filled with bats, zombies, beasts and soldiers. You’ll get updates on the mission from a woman named Anna, but other than her, you’re on your own.
We got to take Scorpion through a flooded warehouse today, and as we ducked beneath scaffolding and blasted man-eating zombies, it was clear Akella was going for a jump-out -and-scare-you feel. Filled with dark corners and creepy monsters, there were plenty of opportunities to crap your pants, but you could always arm your night-vision goggles or flashlight.”
.. and also GameSpot were able to play the same demo:
“Showdown: Scorpion seems to be a fairly straight-ahead shooter. There are supposedly two methods to the madness here: Either you can proceed stealthily and attack your enemies with silenced weapons, or you can go to town with a number of modern and futuristic weapons if you wish to just blow some stuff up.
The weapons here are, at least in the section that we saw, a fairly normal group of pistols and machine guns, including a slightly advanced model of the venerable AK assault rifle family. There are going to be some wackier weapons on hand, though, such as the quote-unquote “gravity gun,” which shoots out a ball of gravity that violently repels anyone near the center of the explosion away from it. In addition, the genetic experimentation that was performed on you will let you enter a bullet-time state to slow down your enemies, a la Max Payne, or even in some cases psychically dominate your enemies and force them to fight for you.”
This was meant to be B-Cool’s first project, but it seems it was too much for a small team. In the end Showdown: Scorpion was cancelled. Some models were later reused for Scorpion: Disfigured, which was a different game despite a similar title and look. B-Cool was closed in 2009, with many more canned projects such as a “Scorpion” sequel, Metro-3 (third game in The Stalin Subway series for Buka Entertainment) and Los Angeles Guerilla 2040.
In 2004 Australian developer KaWow! started working on a first-person shooter called The Unseelie, that mixed horror with adventure elements. The game told a storyline about an old haunted forest and a village trapped in time. It was planned to be published by Octagon in 2005, but sadly the project was cancelled for unknown reasons.
The Unseelie’s story still stand out today and is a quite haunting and mysterious one:
“In a chilly November evening, Damian Logan is driving his car on the countryside, crossing a dark Irish forest, when suddenly a child-like figure appears on the road. Trying to avoid an accident, Damian`s car gets out of control and crashing into a nearby tree.
Upon awakening he stumbles into an ancient forest, called “Tir-Na-Bràch-Marbh” – Land of the Eternal Death. Wandering lost deeper and deeper into the woodlands, he discovers stones, buried in the shape of a septagram, with a source of light shining from its center.
Walking towards it, the light is bright and dazzling, but suddenly dimming – plunging the forest in absolute blackness. Strange voices begin whispering from left and right, near and far….
As the story unfolds, we learn that Damian is trapped in a world between the living and the dead. The dark haunted forest has tangled and enclosed a 17th century Irish village, severing its contact with the rest of the world and stopping time from passing.
In order to escape and return home, the protagonist has to battle “The Unseelie” (pronounced “Un SHEE Lee”), an unblessed cursed fairy race, based on Celtic mythology.
By defeating all seven demon lords, Damien would obtain certain ritualistic objects which allowed him to escape the clutches of Lord Finvarra, the King of the Dead, by opening a portal to his reality and returning home.”
To help during your quest you would be able to use an arsenal of roughly 30 different weapons, plus the possibility of crafting your own weapons from materials found in the game. By battling foes like Banshees, Goblins, Demons, Elementals and Ghosts, new experience points were collected to unlock skills and upgrade weapons.
“The Unseelie is a great game to work with because of the way it uniquely combines Celtic mythos with popular first-person gameplay,” said Lloyd Melnick, Co-Founder of publisher Octagon.
Over the course of your journey, protagonist Damien would have gained access to a wide range of powers and attacks related to Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Wood, Metal and Spirit. Some monsters were resistant against physical attacks and could only be beaten with certain magic.
The adventure-aspect of the game focused on players using elemental powers to solve many puzzles on the way through the 7 levels of the three-dimensional environment, generated by their homemade AMP II engine, which offered real-time lighting, matrix shading, high-resolution textures and bump mapping.
“We used all of the visually stunning rendering techniques of our engine and combined them with the sinister forest setting of Celtic legend and some engaging game play design to make something that makes you want to play, but keeps you looking over your shoulder,” explained Steve Woodgate, who was KaWoW! CEO until 2016 and is currently managing director of Coronum Pty Ltd.
It is unclear what happened to the studio. Since Mr. Woodgate left KaWoW! in 2016 we can assume they were active at least until that date, even though no other game seems to have been released since the cancellation of The Unseelie.
The company’s old website (www.kawow.com) is unreachable, and what remains today are only screenshots, a few articles splattered across the web and a couple of videos showing in-game footage. This was probably from the beginning of the game, when Damien escapes his crashed vehicle and discovers a stone-circle with a beam of light in the middle, showing: “Some fairy tales were never meant to be told…“.
Grafan is a cancelled RPG supposed to be the first big project of 2003 freshly founded company EMOGENCE (Emotion-intelligence), consisting of ex Microsoft staff Herb Marselas and Chas (Charles) Boyd. Both coming from a technical background, Marselas started working for Microprose in the 90ies and made his name for blockbusters like “Age Of Mythology”, “Halo 2” and many more. Boyd on the other hand originally came from the Aeronautics Industry and later worked with different Hardware and video game companies as a mentor to help improve engine-performance.
“We were talking about the kinds of graphics and gameplay we`d like to see in games and whether we could start a studio that provides a gameplay experience that stood out from the crowd.“
Their ambitious plan was to create a PC first person action role playing game “…that delivers great gameplay and graphically surpasses any interactive entertainment experience to date“, optimistically setting a deadline to the end of the same year (2004).
Apparently the key of saving so much time was to automate the generation of content – including world building and scripting, which would be done manually by any other developer. They though graphics would evolve so quickly, they felt like they didn’t want to lose time and deliver a game that was technically high-end and brand new as soon as possible. Unfortunately we know the game was never released and only a few interviews and a handful of screenshots remain today.
There was never any talk about why or when the game was cancelled or what happened to the studio. We can only reconstruct the game`s planned content, by closely reading statements and interviews done by IGN in 2004:
“Grafan gives the player a huge amount of character customization through class selection, skill point spending, and by equipping many of the thousands of items found in the world. There is a single player campaign as well as a random dungeon quest mode. The underlying engine is a highly sophisticated 3D random dungeon generator that utilizes a lot of advanced graphics technology, including real-time high dynamic range lighting, multiple real-time shadows, normal maps, glare, and pixel shading.“
Talking about graphics EMOGENCE were obviously visual enthusiasts, who developed an engine that was able to create “…environments on the fly and showcased high-resolution texturing“. Nvidia stated:
“The Grafan game engine’s use of high dynamic-range lighting, multiple real-time shadows, and multipass rendering techniques requires a high-performance graphics card. We’re currently working with the GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU and using pixel shader 3.0; all we can say is ‘wow’.”
It is also worth mentioning that they planned to showcase the game at the E3 2004, but by checking the list of exhibitors retrospectively, EMOGENCE never shown up.
To date Herb Marselas is working at AMD, a popular computer processor company. Chas Boyd was last seen on Max Payne and Alan Wake credits, but after that we kinda lost track of him. By browsing different gaming-databases we can assume that he may have not been active in the gaming scene since.
Liquid Development are a rather obscure gaming studio which usually do contract work for many different publishers. They helped during development of such popular titles as Fable 2, Swat 4, Dragon age 2, Fallout 3, The Sims 2, Halo 4, Borderlands 2 and many more. Around 2003 – 2004 they were working on Armored Titans, a cancelled tank combat game planned to be published by Landing Party Software for PC.
This is quite the obscure and forgotten game, as it was never officially announced and today’s almost impossible to find any evidence of the existence of Landing Party Software. The only proof of its development are a few 3D models made for the game and some old resumes of people who worked on the project. By looking at these tanks models it looks like the game would have been set in a sci-fi future.
Nothing more is know at the moment about Armored Titans. We can assume Landing Party closed down and Liquid Development were not able to complete the project. Around the same time the team also worked on assets for Warhawk (PS3), so it’s possible that some of their experience and models were useful for Incognito Entertainment’s project. Many years later Liquid Development did release a couple of tank-battle games, as they helped with Armored Warfare and World of Tanks.
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