Unseen News

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz we got the news about the cancellations of 2 big Playstation 3 games, Eight Days and The Getaway 3. The reasons for this are “due to the redistribution of resources and budget” as the company said. On Wikipedia we read that “Eight Days was to be a PlayStation 3 game from Sony’s London Studio. It was shown for the first time at Sony’s E3 2006 press conference. It was a hybrid of a third-person shooter and driving action that shares similarities with the PlayStation Portable game, Pursuit Force” and “the Getaway 3 was to be the third installment of Sony’s sandbox games series”. We’ll add these 2 games in our archive later, while we start to wonder if the PS3 will be the best console for the unseen gaming in this generation. Searching the anwswer, we can start to look at these videos:

Eight Days:

The Getaway 3:

In the infinite web of the internet, sometimes we can find interesting memorial about lost gaming stuff, like this page from the developer of the GB version of Mr.Do, where we can read some fun facts about the game: “Mr.Do! was given a very limited release in Europe – in its unfinished form! [..] The game was meant to have a link-up cable option, where two players had to battle it out on a much bigger map. This was never completed due to problems with the development kit I was using (this ‘menu option’ has been removed). Also the baddie intelligence was never finished – they don’t ‘search’ the playfield correctly or ‘stumble’ beneath falling apples as they should. There was also supposed to be two modes of display – an authentic ‘full-screen’ version (with tiny graphics – see the pause mode below) and the scrolling, high detailed one that appears in the ‘end product.”

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.”

You can read more about this @ Team Fortress 2 (GabeN) or you can see more TF2 beta stuff in our archive page for the game 

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 »