In 2002, the game originally saw an expansion pack/sequel in the form of Dragon Throne: Battle of Red Cliffs, and was set to get a true successor the following year titled, “Fate of the Dragon II“. While a number of screenshots were released, very little about the game was known outside of China, and little to no official announcement or press coverage was given.
According to recent research, and a post on Chinese forum hupu.com, the sequel never saw the light of day, and was indeed cancelled around 80% development. In 2004, the game’s engine and graphics were reused for the still ongoing Chinese exclusive MMO: Fate Online, also known as Fate of the Dragon Online, and Dragon Throne Online. Currently the game has no localization outside of mainland China.
Shining Star is a cancelled strategy game once in development for Game Boy Advance by Eworks Studios, conceived from an original idea by British producer Faraz Ansari, former leader of the now-closed studio Storm Entertainment.
In this military shooter players would control “Kool Shen”, a silent “one man army” with a dry sense of humor. Eworks Studios started working on Shining Star in 2005, planning to build a “proof of concept” to be presented to investors. Concept art was initially created by Bruno Covachã and Marco Vale, but later Tiago Pimentel became the main character designer for the project. Marco Leal was hired for a month to create sprites, while Vale was responsible for their animations.
A playable prototype was developed by Eworks, a short demo in which you start in a deserted village in a south American jungle, and have to fight against your enemies using a shotgun, a pistol and some grenades. A few areas were available and in each level players would face different challenges in some sort of a maze, using obstacles in their favor to defeat enemy soldiers.
Two support characters would help players in their missions and explain the main goals. One of them was named “Shurk’n”, a war hero colonel with a very aggressive personality who would frequently lose control. The second character was named “Dragon Ash”, a woman commander who would give positive reinforcement and more confidence to players in a way that would be the opposite of the colonel’s.
According to the design document they wanted to develop an original and complex artificial intelligence to control the game’s enemies. An interesting concept of “action-reaction” was fully implemented in Shining Star’s prototype to make enemies to react to players’ movement and strategies. These enemies would following a “playbook”, a kind of database of different reactions (like throwing a grenade, moving, covering and so on) specific to each map that would be activated in a way that would simulate a tactical action against the player.
Artworks for the game were heavily inspired by Metal Slug, while Riviera was quoted as a reference for menus and graphics interface. Advance Wars was also a strong inspiration for the team, mainly for how dialogs and characters would have been shown.
Development of the prototype was filled with communication problems between the producer and the team. If this was not enough, the GBA was already at the end of its life-cycle, the Nintendo DS was already released but they were not able to get a dev-kit for the new console. Eworks Studios were able to complete their playable prototype, and to deliver it to the game’s producer.
Unfortunately they never found a publisher interested in their game and in the end the project was canned. Later Eworks Studios thought to rework Shining Star into a 3D game to be released on digital download, but it never happened.
In the gallery below you can see some concept art by Tiago Pimentel, concepts and pixel art by Marco Vale and also a few screenshots of a very early prototype also provided by Vale. Thanks to their time and help we were able to preserve these details, to remember the existence of this game that will never be.
If you know someone who knows what happened to Faraz Ansari, Storm Entertainment or the whereabouts of the playable Shining Star prototype please let us know!
Article by Jump/Error, original version in Portuguese on the Videogame PT Blog!
Dark Matter: The Baryon Project is a cancelled sci-fi shooter RPG that was in development by Pixelcage, planned to be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. The project was quite ambitious for a rather small and obscure team, promising to offer both on-foot first-person shooting and third person spacecraft combat.
The development of the game started around summer 2003. The game was planned to be released in 2007.
In their old – now closed – website, we can read they wanted to create a vast universe in which to freely fly around, inspired by such games as “TIE-Fighter” and “Freespace”. You would fight in space against huge spacecrafts planned to be up to 100 km (62 miles) in size – something that would be considered a massive open-world even by today’s standards (SKYRIM’s world is about 5 km wide), gigantic spaceships-worlds in which you could also break-in to continue attacking your enemies on foot.
“When playing such games in the past, I always wondered how it would be to just ram one of that bigger vessels and just “clear the bridge manually”. With today’s hardware capabilities, we now do a swing on it. – Marco Sobol, former Pixelcage developer”
If this was not enough to hype up the project, they also wrote about “graphic details up to a grade of millimeters!”, “experience speeds of up to 3000 km/h!”, “have a million polygons on your screen – in realtime!” and “can you handle hundreds of enemies?”. For sure the team had big dreams for their first project.
For this objective the studio created it’s own ambitious 3D engine, during 3 years of development. Their expectation for the game’s graphic was quite high.
Thanks to an old interview with Pixelcage by Gengamers, we can read that work for the game began in 2003 with a core team of only 7 people, with plans to expand the studio to more than 40 people when they would finally find a publisher.
The game also didn’t want to limit itself to a “pure space shooter”, planning more ambitious features such as directing a vessel and fighting against other space ships. Marco Sobol (former developer of the game), described Dark Matter’s gameplay as follows:
“Dark Matter is a first person shooter/ space shooter with some RPG elements, such as an inventory and improving skills, but without the flaws of pondering about tables and character sheets. It will feel much like a common FPS when it comes to game controls and speed, but comes with hours of dynamic scripted scenes, a non-linear storyline and state-of-the-art sound effects and music.”
Not only gameplay and huge environments would have been quite ambitious for its time, Dark Matter: The Baryon Project was also planned to have a open-ended storyline with different endings. Pixelcage wanted to have several playable characters appearing in the game and time travelling would have played an important role, featuring morphing aliens and fierce “time warriors”.
Its settings were heavily inspired by such movies and agems as The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, TIE-Fighter and Freespace. Aliens, humanoids and shape-shifters would have been some of many characters and enemies players had to face. Plenty of NPC‘s would have behaved depending on players’ action, whether being friendly or evil towards them.
If such an immense game like this was not complex enough to develop, the team also wanted to add online multiplayer:
“We will put much efforts in the multiplayer part. There will be several deathmatch and teamplay modes, we even plan to include a mode in which you can play the single player campaign together with your friends. This is generally possible because there is more than one prime character in the game.”
They also wanted to publish a playable demo but we don’t know if they ever got something playable to release to the public.
It’s easy to see how Pixelcage were a passionate team with many ambitious ideas for their project, but unfortunately it seems they never found a publisher interested in funding it. In the end they had to abandon Dark Matter: The Baryon Project to work on other, simpler games such as Switchfire (published in 2006) and Jekyll & Hyde (2010), before to close down the studio.
If you know someone who worked on this game and could help us to preserve more screens, videos and details, please let us know!
After being one of the most forgotten hidden gems for Game Boy Color in 2002, in the last few years Shantae became a cult-series, with 4 main games developed by WayForward Technologies for PC, Wii U, DS, Playstation 4, 3DS, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. While Shantae games are quite popular today, most fans still don’t know that the first, original Shantae project for Playstation 1 and PC was never released.
“It is a time of magic and majesty, where strange beasts roam the land and beautiful creatures wield powerful magic. In this world lives a young girl named Shantae… a troubled genie, born without magic, yet the only individual capable of saving the realm from disaster. Following a century of imprisonment underground, three powerful Jins have broken the seal that restrained them, and now seek to drain the world of the magic it needs to survive. As the magic is stolen, the peaceful creatures that once harbored it are left weak and helpless. Shantae, unaffected by the magic drain, is the only hope for peace. But can she possibly battle the Jins and their legion of monsters relying only on the magic she reclaims along the way? It’s up to you to guide Shantae through perilous traps and dangers beyond your wildest imaginings!”
“Shantae is designed for the PC or comparable game system (such as the Sony Playstation). The gameplay is full 3-D, with traditionally (2D) animated characters that move in and out of the rendered backgrounds. With this advantage, players can travel down streets, enter tunnels or battle monsters several times the size of the normal viewing area! Perhaps the best feature of this 3-D system is the totally hands-free camera movement. The view automatically zooms in or out, up or down depending on the proximity of Shantae to other important elements. In addition, the paths Shantae can take often split into different layers of depth, allowing the player to walk on near or far surfaces in order to get around obstructions, crevices, or buildings. Also, enemies can attack from any direction in three-dimensional space in order to hunt Shantae down. It’s the long awaited blend of 2-D’s fluid animation and 3-D’s next generation gameplay rolled into one!”
“We had a polygonal Shantae that could be run around in three distinct gameplay ‘gyms’. […] One was a spline-scroller (like Namco’s Klonoa), one was a free-range 3D like Mario 64, and the last was an isometric 3D platformer. We’ve done a lot of exploration in this area… Shantae was a sprite/3D hybrid for PlayStation and PC, and was free-roaming on the PlayStation 2.”
Shantae’s character design was a bit different in this lost game, compared to her current design:
In 2013 during a live streaming the WayForward team played the cancelled Shantae 2: Risky Revolution for GBA, so we can only hope that one day they could also find a playable version of this cancelled Playstation / PC version to show it to the world. Only a few, small screenshots are currently saved in the gallery below.
2018 is here and as every year we’d like to review what we did the last year and make some plans for the new one :)
As most of you known, we work on Unseen64 in our own free time, after a long day of our day-jobs, taking away this extra time from our sleep, friends andfamily just to read Unseen64 related emails, reply to messages on social networks, resolve technical issues on the site, search info on lost games, save media, contact developers and write articles.
Even if you only see a few articles or videos published every month, to keep the site alive as it is, it takes dozens and dozens of hours of work every week. 99% of the articles are written by monokoma, who also manages tech issues, replies to emails and on social networks (mostly on Twitter). In 2017 we started to repay a few of these hours thanks to the help of all of our Patrons, to let him work a bit less on freelance jobs and to work a few more hours on Unseen64 instead.
We still did not reach our goal of $550 on Patreon, so monokoma can’t really quit any more of his freelance activities to invest more time into Unseen64. Still, these donations permits him to not lose faith in our project and to keep it alive – instead than to close the site down.
Patreon is essential for the survival of a niche project like Unseen64, a website 99% managed by a single italian guy in this age of Youtube and gaming videos in english.
We are really grateful for your kind words and your help: without our Patrons, Unseen64 would already be dead. You prompt us to keep up doing this, even during the hardest times.
What we did in 2017
We saved these forgotten lost games in our website:
These are just a few example of the whole unseen history of video games we could lose if not researched and unveiled.
When everyone already know about such lost games as Zelda URA, Resident Evil 1.5, Bio Force Ape or Sonic X-Treme, there’s not much left to discover: only less popular / important lost games (that still deserve to be remembered) or previously unknown and intriguing projects that can only be covered by luck or months of time-consuming researches.
To continue our work, we entrust you and all of our Patrons, people who know why it’s important to keep a site like Unseen64 alive.
Unseen64 plans in 2018
In 2018, we’ll continue doing our best to remember lost games no one else cares to write about:
Continue covering lost games on Unseen64, even the less impressive ones: every single cancelled game deserve to not be forgotten, because each one could have been a favorite game for someone. Some of these less-impressive unseen games still have an historical importance, an interesting connection with developers who later created a different masterpiece. Even if some of these canned projects could have been bad games if only released, we still care to remember them for curiosity and historical preservation.
Expanding old articles for some of the more interesting unseen games that are not already covered somewhere else: even when an unseen game is widely known, there could still be many details that are missing about its development, plot, gameplay mechanics and other random memories about its conception. We’d like to dedicate some time to deeply research more info about some of our favorite games we’ll never play, those lost games that also have a wide appeal and could be interesting for all kind of readers.
Continue making new video articles: we know that today most people don’t read gaming reviews on websites anymore and just rely on video reviews from Youtube. For “historical” websites like Unseen64 is just the same: there are many more people that would watch a 10 minutes video about a cancelled game, rather than to fully read a 1.000 words article on the same topic, as proven by the Unseen64 video series created by Liam and hosted on Did You Know Gaming. Just like in the past gaming magazines have been replaced by gaming websites, now youtubers are taking the mass-market lead for videogames reviews, news and historical researches. While it requires more time to create video articles by monokoma (with the help of some english friends for voice-over), this kind of coverage would reach many more users than 3 or 4 written articles and it would help to keep patrons to donate for Unseen64. As we have seen, people are more incline to donate for video content than for website articles.
Continue publishing the cheap-edition of our book: in September 2017 we also started to release a new low-price edition of the Unseen64 book, divided into different volumes, so you can choose your favorite consoles. At the moment the first volume is available, dedicated to cancelled 8 bit and 16 bit games (NES, Master System, Game Boy, Turbografx 16, Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive). We are currently working on the next volume for 32 bit and 64 bit games! We will also release a kindle version in the future (ad the moment you can already get a PDF version of the book by pledging 5 $ on Patreon). By keep selling our book, we can raise even more funds to keep working more and more on Unseen64.
All of these activities will require time, efforts and collaboration between all the people who help the Unseen64 collective, but we really want to keep Unseen64 alive for as much as possible.
As always big gaming networks such as IGN or Kotaku have the resources to own powerful servers and to pay a team to work full-time on their websites, keeping them online and publishing daily updates.
We don’t have their resources, but we think we have something better: we have you, a community of gamers who know why it’s important to remember beta and cancelled games.
There are many ways to help Unseen64 and thanks to all the other websites, gamers and youtubers who also use their time to remember beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, together we can save as many unseen games as possible.
Remember: Unseen64 is still online thanks to the awesome people who pledge on Patreon: together, we can do it!
We’d like to thank all of you (in order of donations) who are helping U64 on Patreon:
Daan Koopman, Sentinator of Team Haruhi, joef0x, Mark J. Lang, Thomas Whitehead, David Galindo, Patrick Enriquez, Riptide, Patrick Kupilas, Александр Шутенков, Alex Schaeffer, Renee Violette, Mcsahon, Chris Chapman, Marty Thao, Ryan Razon, Taylor H, Itay Brenner, Pierre-Luc Pineault, Tiago Pereira dos Santos silva, Emiliano Rosales, Faisal AlKubaisi, Julian Lord, Shane Gill, Kaleb Ratcliff, Vitor Takayanagi de Oliveira, Joe Tangco, Peter Lewis, TheUnbeholden, Matt T, Thomas Muste Jr, Hannes, MARTAZIA A BROWN, Pedro, Gabriel Girouard, Jonah Bealy, Sebastian Haley, Knight, Mason “SoberDwarf” M., Arkadij, Ben Salvidrim, Keith Stack, Benjamin Swan, The Video Game History Foundation, Daryl Baxter, Nick Fancher, allan paxton, Robert Dyson, tydaze, Justin Moor, Liam Robertson, Kristian Binder, Gabe Canada, Tim Lawrence, Thomas.nunn7, That Black Guy, Mauro Labate, Olivier Cahagne, Alex MacIntyre, Henry Branch, Matthew, Anders “Captain N” Iversen, Coldi, Joe Brookes, James Jackson, Aaron Sharratt, Jonathan Pena, Jonathan Cooper, Paul Stedman, Jrg McJrg, Brice Onken, Alex Stutzman, Guilherme Killingsworth, Pablo Bueno Navarro, Paul, Josh Mann, Dan Thomas, Adrian, Ben Cowling, Alex Wawro, Niels Thomassen, Lou, Matthew Gyure, PtoPOnline, Jesus Tovar, Jacob, Brandon, Lisa, Martin GP (KAISER77), Aaron, James Steel, Tony, Bransfield, Christopher Cornwell, Anatoly, Goffredo and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)
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