PSYCHO 5-0 was a prototype for a third person shooter / car combat game in development for about 2 years at Sony Santa Monica Studio for the Playstation 2, but later canned for unknown reasons. It’s interesting to notice that in Calling All Cars, a PS3 game by Incognito Entertainment (part of the SCEA Santa Monica Studio) one of the cars is named PSYCHO 5-0, a nice citation of this unseen project.
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Redwood Falls is a canceled horror science-fiction First-Person Shooter that was in development for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 at Kuju Entertainment from 2006 to 2007, that led to an impressive looking playable demo made as a way to pitch a publishers for the final game. The project was running on Unreal Engine 3, with full flammable and destructible environment, enemies scared of fire, an infective virus that was able to regenerate monsters and a potentially interesting gameplay.
Sadly the development of the game was stopped in 2007: Kuju was bought by German company Catalis Group. The new owners were not interested in a new IP like this one and did not gave more funds to continue the project. Even if many publishers were impressed with this prototype, especially as it was the result of only 4 months of work, without the possibility to see more of the gameplay mechanics, none was confident enough to support it. In the end Redwood Falls was officially cancelled and only few screens and a video remain from this promising title.
In June 2021, DreadXP managed to get an interview with Redwood Falls former creative director Cumron ‘Ron’ Ashtiani in order to learn more about the story of the game and its development:
(…) In the horror space, one of the most promising projects to get axed was Redwood Falls, a cancelled Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game developed in the mid-noughties by Kuju Entertainment. (…) we decided it’d be cool to try and learn a bit more about the story behind this game was. So saying, we caught up with Ron Ashtiani, the game’s Creative Director, to get the scoop.
What was Redwood Falls in a nutshell? How did you get involved with the project?
Redwood Falls was a survival horror FPS game that I devised with Sean Murray (now of Hello Games) and a team of awesome guys back in 2007 when we were all working at Kuju Entertainment. At the time I had unfinished business from when I’d been working on 2002’s The Thing by Computer Artworks and its cancelled sequel. I wanted to continue working in the horror genre, but this time being able to leverage the then cutting edge Unreal Engine 3.
There’d been a number of graphical and gameplay features that we couldn’t do back in 2003 on the PS2 [when working on The Thing games] but by 2007 we could. This included stuff like dynamic body transformations, with humans morphing into creatures, and dynamic body damage that would let you blow creatures apart. I was also in love with the arctic as a setting for horror due to the isolation and the contrast of blood effects on white snow. The environment would have been a key part of the gameplay and story.
What was the story of Redwood Falls?
The player was a small town police officer in Alaska. Normally a quiet place where not much went on, everything would change with a sighting of something strange in the sky crashing in the wilderness. This would have coincided with reports of animals being found mutilated and people going missing. At the start of the game, the two events would have believed to have been unrelated; the only person who’d have witnessed the crash would have been someone quite unreliable. As the story unfolded, however, we’d have taken heavy influence from the thing in John Carpenter’s film by having an alien being that utilized a host creature to survive.
As the story progressed, more and more people in the town would have either vanished or started behaving strangely, as they’d been infected. The player would have had to try and isolate the alien infection and destroy it. The government would have eventually turned up with troops, though it would out that they knew all about this phenomenon, and were bent on simply destroying the whole town and the people living there.
Can you talk about some of the gameplay features?
At the time it would have been a cutting edge FPS. The main USP would have been the creatures, which could have “burst out” from any infected human. The combat would have also had dynamic body damage, where the player could shoot big chunks off them and they would have kept moving, regenerating and even subdividing.
Another feature was that the town itself would have been a persistent world where time continually passes, so when you left an area, things may have changed when you returned.
What were some of the enemy types?
Each of the creatures would have been derived from a living host, so for example, a dog could have be infected and would have created a dog-like alien creature. This was the same for humans, and we would have had a bunch of different enemy classes, from small creatures that were more like cannon fodder to big ones that were like bosses.
The game was also going to have a multiplayer mode – what would that have involved?
We were considering a squad-like game where multiple people could play in FPS mode in the town and work together. It was basically going to be co-op with all players fighting against a CPU-controlled alien infection. We also wanted to have a mode where one player was infected and the others had to figure out who it is. The infected player’s mission would have been to try to “recruit” other, non-infected players whilst remaining undetected.
Why did Redwood Falls get cancelled?
We’d spent six months working on the prototype with a team of seven, before the studio was refocused to mobile gaming. At the time the budget needed to make a game of this graphical fidelity was very high and money was scarce in the games industry. We’d also had a lot of horror games come out at that time, like Resident Evil 5 and 6 and Dead Space, and publishers felt it was oversaturated as a genre. Mobile was just starting to take off and Kuju decided to pivot our studio to that market. At that point I left to join Midway Games, and the other guys [who’d worked on the demo] left to form Hello Games a year after.
Other canceled games by Kuju Entertainment can be viewed here.
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Cannon Fodder 3D is a cancelled action game that was in development for the Playstation 2. After selling Sensible Software to Codemasters, Jon Hare ended up consulting on many of their development projects. One of which was the PS2 title Prince Naseem Boxing. Work on this title was performed in a satellite studio based in Hammersmith, London. However due to the commercial failure of this title, the studio was shut down.
A casualty of this was cancellation of a 3D update of Cannon Fodder, something that Hare had been working on for at least nine months. Hare did speak about how he was looking to expand on the whole theme of war and include gameplay not just set on the battlefield: “I’d like to focus on the public’s perceptions of war and warfare. There’s many interesting things that go on behind the scenes with politicians”.
In an interview with Eurogamer in late 2005, Jon confirmed that there was up to two years’ work (on and off) put into a 3D update of Cannon Fodder: “I designed Cannon Fodder 3 with Codies six years ago, development stopped and started three times and eventually it was seemingly permanently halted when the London studio was closed four years ago.” He then went on to add: “Nothing would please me more than to see this project resurrected, it was very advanced in its structure and therefore would need little modernisation.”
Thanks to News for the description!
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SaGa Frontier is a PlayStation RPG by Square, released in Japan on July 11, 1997 and in North America on March 25, 1998.
Originally, the title of this game was “Romancing SaGa 4” during early development. In that stage of development, two more heroes’ quests were also being planned, in addition to the existing seven lead characters. One of them was Fuse, the IRPO agent who may be enlisted as a playable character in the actual release. In his quest, Fuse was supposed to be able to take part in other characters’ scenarios, and the ultimate goal of his quest might be determined by what the player did in the course of gameplay. The “ninth” protagonist was to be the daughter of a channellers family who is engaging in a controversy as to who of them shall inherit the property of their former patriarch. This scenario seems to be dropped during the early development because of being too comedic.
Due to time constraints, some plot points of Asellus’ story were removed too. During those events, Asellus was supposed to visit Dr. Nusakan’s clinic, Bio Research Lab, Lambda Base, and Furdo’s Workshop so that she would find her true identity so that she would decide to live as a human being or as a mystic. These quests were also intended to affect her scenario’s ending. [Info from Wikipedia]
Eriol made us to notice that “Asellus […] supposed to throw herself at Kurenai, and it explains why she has a naked sprite (just go to the debug mode). And also, does Rei-hime suppose to sell sacred lot in first place? I never able to draw anything from her, she always said SOLD OUT.”
Thanks to Robert Seddon we found out that there’s some untranslated text in the North American version of SaGa Frontier (though of course it might turn out just to be duplicate stuff from other maps). You can check the “misterious” japanese text in the gallery below. At Robert’s Blog we can even read that the “Fuse’s sprite, seen in the bottom left of the prototype title screen shown in The Essence of SaGa Frontier, but cut from the final one, with his entire quest, actually still exists and is even loaded into VRAM.” You can read more about it in here.
Also Zedprice has translated an interesting interview with Akitoshi Kawazu, director of the game:
What is the reason that Rouge can learn Mind Magic, but Blue can’t?
My bad. Blue and Rouge should have both been able to earn the gift of Mind Magic before their final confrontation. If the game is released in an English version, we will certainly fix that. “Saga Frontier International”? That probably won’t happen.
Where exactly does the final showdown between Blue and Rouge take place?
Actually, that was never decided. At first we were thinking that when you go to a swamp or a dungeon, you would meet Rouge there, talk a bit, then fight. Being pursued just in like in Asellus’ story, right? Having that ultimate battle in any location turned out to be impossible, so we settled on the current location.
Right after the beginning of the scenario, a message saying, “Hurry, seek out magical talents before Rouge” appears. Is there actually a time limit on Blue’s magic quest?
There was when we first started out. […] But, in the spirit of SaGa games allowing players to develop their characters the way they like, we decided restricting players like that would be a waste.
As we wrote already in another news, informations on the removed SaGa Frontier scenes can be found in a Japanese book called ‘The Essence of SaGa Frontier‘. “‘Red’s quest was supposed to have a unique spin to it– he was supposed to have a love parameter that would determine how close Red and Yuria are.” Some scans of this book, with concept arts and screens from the removed stuff, can be found at IRPO website and in this Livejournal gallery.
Also, you can find much more screens and info about the unused stuff hidden in the game’s code at The Cutting Room Floor! For a deep-dive into the game’s development and changes, check FFVDGames!
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In the Youtube channel of fujlc we can see an interesting video from an early beta of Symphon Filter, with a different HUD and maybe more differences.. i never played this game, so i’m not sure.
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