It seems that finally an organization is going to seriously work in collaboration with developers to try to preserve the games that could be lost forever. As we can read on their website “The National Videogame Archive is a joint project between the National Media Museum and Nottingham Trent University, which aims to celebrate that culture and preserve that history for researchers, developers, game fans and the public”. With the Save The Videogame campaign they are trying to “encourage a debate about what games are, what they mean to the people who play them, and what elements of them should be preserved” […] “Consoles, cartridges, discs, and tapes gather dust in lofts. Crucial prototypes get thrown away when studios go bust, rare versions of classic games are lost forever. Every day, we lose another little bit of our history.” Will they be able to save prototypes and share media from cancelled games? We sure hope so! U64 is just a little group of geeks and we cant really do much, but if a serious organization will be able to keep up with a project like this, more unseen games could be saved. Good luck TNVA!
More cancelled games from Brash Entertainment?
A news on Gamespot from some days ago talked about the financial troubles that are going on at Brash Entertainment: over 20 employees will be laying off and they are looking to ditch rights for a bunch of unfinished games that were currently in development. Superman (by Factor 5?), Tale of Desperaux, Prison Break, Night at the Museum 2, Clash of the Titans and 300 could be cancelled if they dont find any other publishers that would like to release them. More games for the Unseen Archive? Most of those projects are based on movie and TV properties, but we dont have any screens or videos from the gaming versions yet..
Various Megaman unused sprites
The people at Sprites INC. ripped some sprites from the Megaman series and found some nice unused stuff in there! Some of the most interesting ones are:
Megaman 9 Skateboard enemy falling sprite:
Megaman ZX – DS debug room:
Megaman 2 unused tiles:
Megaman 7 unused enemies / sprites:
[New Article] A summary of the Mother 3 project
Mother 3 was going to be a Nintendo 64 sequel of the SNES RPG know as Earthbound. It was, however, cancelled in 2000, but later the game resurfaced on the GBA and it was officially released in 2006. Now that the english fan-translation of Mother 3 is out, we can finally trying to analyze the old beta with the help of the few informations we have in English. >> Read the full story
Heroes game is now officially cancelled
On the MTV Gameblog we can find the confirmation about the cancellation of the Heroes videogame, a title based on the TV serie that was in development at Ubisoft for the current generation consoles: “The rights to the ‘Heroes’ video game have reverted back to NBC Universal. Ubisoft will no longer produce a video game based on the TV series. The game was officially announced in July 2007 and slated to release in late 2008. Ubisoft’s announcement follows NBC’s firing of the program’s executive producers, reported by Variety this past weekend.” No screens or videos were released before the cancellation, but maybe some media will be leaked in the future.