At the Team GabeN wiki website we can read some interesting informations about the development of Team Fortress 2: “Valve’s second concept for TF2 featured a Sci-Fi theme with none of the characters or even places being related to the Half-Life story. Following the Half-Life 2 leak, CS and HL1 ports were released by Anon. The Counter-Strike port included two out-of-place player models under the names “temp_player.mdl” and “alien_commando.mdl”. Those are a Human and the Alien Commando and they’re the only known/available TF2 models we have from Valve. Any other asset made for that game simply doesn’t exist or is not available to the general public.”
As you probably already know, the Unseen 64 Staff is not the only group of beta geeks that loves to talk about the cuts and changes in the gaming development: online we can find some other great sites dedicated to the beta-researches. Often these groups of gaming archeologist are hidden under the fame of the traditional gaming websites. It’s not always easy to find places with informations about the lost games, but if we can linking togheter all these resourches, we can have a better look at the beta world. The cooperation between the different websites related to the unseen games can help us to better archive, retain, filter and protect those gaming informations and documents that could be forgotten. With this series of interviews we would like to try to introduce the various beta-websites that exist out there, to know a bit more the staff behind them and their thoughs about the gaming unseen. In this first interview we have interviewed Frank Cifaldi, also know as RedEye, the editor in chief of Lost Levels Online. Read the rest of this entry »
Prince of Persia Prodigy (also know as Prince of Persia Zero in its early beta days) is an action-adventure and platforming game developed by Ubisoft Montreal. It was released on December 2, 2008 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Proof of conception for this new title was found in September 2006, when a file that was leaked to the internet was found to contain concept art for the game, although Ubisoft didn’t announce the game until May 2008. [Infos from Wikipedia]
In january 2008, Surfer Girl released some screenshots from an early prototype of this new Prince Of Persia, in which the main character was followed by a mysterious flying girl. As you know, the final game has not flying-girls that follow the prince. As we can read over at GameSetWatch, thanks to “David Pettitt” we learn that this version was “a target render that the team pitched the game with”. It seems that Ubisoft showed the full Target Render at a Vancouver SIGGRAPH event. Below you can see the full video!
Some other rumors even say that originally Assassin’s Creed was meant to be part of the Prince of Persia series. Probably Ubisoft created a lot of different ideas for the project, before choosing the final one.
Even the released game has some differences from the official beta screens that we can find online. As noticed by FullMetalMC:
Different colors for the Hunter
Elika’s clothing is a bit different
A removed enemy
Prince’s sword has a alternate design
Different Tree
Elikas magic has less detail
In an interview with Prince of Persia Producer Ben Mattes, we can read more about Elika’s development:
To further answer your initial question of how her design evolved, at the beginning of the game, one of the things we were thinking about was — should she have more of an autonomous personality? Should she have a little bit more autonomy as a gameplay mechanic?
So we developed ideas of her sometimes taking the lead, or her sometimes wandering off and looking at key game points, or her basically just taking initiative. Some of them only got as far as concepts and brainstorms, some of them actually got as far as prototypes, but what we quickly realised was there was a lot of design that had to be done in terms of simplifying Elika’s involvement to make sure we delivered on that promise that she never gets in the way and she’s never a negative.
We had instances where we had interest points in the world — little objects that would attract her attention, and if you idled for a few minutes she would wander over to one of those objects to look at it, but then the player would, y’know, haul ass to the left and Elika’s wandering over there looking at that thing and then he has to stop and wait and go and get her and bring her back, and it was these things that detracted from that overall core message, which is more important than anything else.
[…] initially we kicked around the ideas of Elika being a young girl, but that brought up the whole babysitting thing, and then we toyed very briefly with the idea of Elika being a partner like a brother or a father figure or something, but it didn’t have the kind of sexual tension that’s fun to play with. And then within a couple of months we had the design of Elika almost fully fleshed out as it exists now.
Thanks to Surfer Girl & Grahamx227 for the contribution!
Hi there everyone. Just letting you know that my website, Past to Present Online, just made a quick Wrath of the Lich King video. If you would like more, just leave a comment! The expansion is due out sometime this year in official form. So keep on seeing the unseen! Link: PtoPOnline
About a week ago, IGN has published a nice article about the development and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme: “Under names like Super Sonic, Sonic Blast, Sonic Bluestreak, and half-dozen others, SEGA toiled away on countless concepts and prototypes on at least four different platforms. Up until the bitter end, SEGA had two teams working separately on completely different concepts, each competing to be the “real” Sonic X-Treme.”
“The project began, predictably enough, after the completion of Sonic & Knuckles in late 1994. The fourth game in the flagship Genesis series was a success, but SEGA was looking to push their mascot in a new direction — it just wasn’t sure what that direction was. Like a good fisherman, SEGA kept several lines in the water. There was the experimental multiplayer Sonic Crackers, eventually to become Knuckles Chaotix; there was the nebulous next-gen reimagining that was X-Treme; and eventually, there was their backup plan, the outsourced Sonic 3D Blast.”
“The public didn’t get to see much of the project’s earliest days. SEGA Technical Institute, the US-based team behind most of Sonic’s Genesis games, was assigned the weighty task. Everyone knew that the next Sonic would have to be a step in a different direction, but there was a lot of uncertainty about what that direction would be. The title was first pitched as another Genesis side-scroller, but was soon moved to the 32X, under the codename “Sonic Mars.”
We are happy when “traditional” gaming websites decide to talk about lost games, so props to them! You can read the full article in here: Sonic X-Treme Revisited @ IGN
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