Unseen News

Some time ago, IGN made an interesting article about the history of Grand Theft Auto and in one of the chapters, there are some informations about the development of the first 3D version of the game: “Bringing GTA into the present tense hit its first roadblock when the DMA crew pulled Body Harvest’s 3D code off the shelf and found it’d aged badly. Building a whole new engine from scratch didn’t fit the schedule. Renting one did.”

“Instead of licensing a proprietary game engine, they became one of the first developers to use generic third-party middleware. Renderware scaled fast. A basic Liberty City was up by summer 2000, and a nameless anti-hero – only referred to as “Claude” in a few obscure lines of code – could boost cars and drive around in it. New elements popped in every month. Weather changed. Day and night marked the time. Some jacked drivers fought back. Stealing the right car opened up bonus missions. Multiplayer got a carry-over from London 1961 and was dropped before the design strayed.”

[…]

“Aircraft-based missions, a GTA first, were curtailed. School kids and elderly pedestrians pushing walkers vanished off the sidewalks. Missions doled out by homeless anarchist Darkel got the chop; only his ice cream truck-bomb job survived, transferred to El Burro with the targets switched from cops to rival gangsters.”

You can read the full story in here. For more screens from the beta version of GTA3, check our archive: GTA 3 Beta / Tech Demo

Thanks to Alber Gallegos for this link! 

We have added some new images in these galleries: GT 2000, Looney Tunes Space Race 64, Phantasy Star 4, Dando & Chakan (DC).

With the success of Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo gave Rare the thumbs up for a sequel on the Virtual Boy. This happened just after the launch of the VB and was only at the drawing boards and in developement for a matter of weeks but it was cancelled due to the obvious failure of the Virtual boy itself. At the end of 1995, a sequel of the original game was released as “Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest” on the SNES.

In 1995, British developer Team17 got to work on a version of the game ‘Worms’ for the Virtual Boy. Little is known about the game other than it was a planned remake of “Worms” with no known differences over the original. The game was cancelled after only few weeks of it in production, probably due to the cancellation of the Virtual Boy release in Europe. There are no screens from the Virtual Boy version and it’s unknow if there even was a playable build.