Disclaimer: This is mostly a backup of an old page created by ATMachine with details about the beta differences in the early versions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It seems that the original page does not exist anymore, so we re-posted this to archive all the interesting details and changes. Enjoy!
The game was developed by LucasArts and released in 1992 as a sequel to “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure”. Originally Fate of Atlantis was meant to be a tie-in to Indiana Jones and the Monkey King/Garden of Life, a rejected script written by Chris Columbus for the third, lost movie. In the end Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein wrote an original story and chosen the Atlantis setting for the project. Many beta screenshots were released in gaming magazines at the time and below you can see all the differences spotted by ATMachine: Read more
The Terror of Tech Town (also known as Tektown) is a cancelled NES game that was in development since late ‘80s by Mattel for their classic Power Glove motion controller. Players would move their “robotic hand” through corridors in a series of hi-tech buildings, interacting with objects and resolving puzzles to open doors and finally escape from the town.
One presumed screenshot of Tech Town seems to have been published in a Power Glove Press Kit showing an updated version of a 1985 Commodore 64 tech demo titled “Time Crystal”, created by Jim Sach. After Jim worked for a while on Time Crystal for Amiga, it seems he managed to sign a deal with Mattel to create a Power Glove version but we are still not sure if the project is the same as Tech Town, as concept gameplay footage of “Time Crystal Powerglove” looks really different from confirmed Tech Town gameplay footage from the Game Players Gametape (as seen in the video below).
The Power Glove Press Kit describes Tech Town with “As you travel through the “corpor-hoods”, the Glove can open doors, search through corridors, and even travel through time and space” so is still possible that the “outdoor environment with dinosaurs” could have been a different section of the same game in a different time. We could see more from the game in the soon-to-be-released The Power of Glove documentary, as another presumed screenshot from Tech Town was published in their Kickstarter campaign page.
In the end only two games created specifically for the Power Glove were ever released by Mattel: Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler. The other 3 games announced (Glove Pilot, Manipulator Glove Adventure and Tech Town) vanished forever after the company and the market lost faith in the accessory.
G.I. Ant is a cancelled real-time strategy game that was in development by SegaSoft / Sega Interactive for PC in late ‘90s. The project was inspired by classic RTS such as Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, with an original hand-to-hand combat following the team’s past experience with Eternal Champions, a 2D fighting game released for Genesis / Mega Drive in 1993. As you can assume by its title, the setting of the game was a war between ants and other insects, imagined with a World War II aesthetic, using rifles, jeeps and airplanes.
“Sega-16: The SegaSoft titles you were working on were canceled. What games were they and what were they about?
Hideki Ikeda: You might have a better interview talking to Frank Lucero about this one. The last one we (John Kuwaye, Andrew Tjew, and I) were working on was called Bug Wars which turned into G.I.Ant (as in “giant”). Bug Wars was John’s baby, but Frank incubated John’s idea and grew it into G.I.Ant, which was a cool concept of a game based on real-time strategy (back then, we were addicted to Command And Conquer and Warcraft II) and hand-to-hand combat (as in Eternal Champions-type fighting).”
In the end the project was never completed, probably because of low sales of all other SegaSoft PC titles.
After finishing Medal of Honor: Vanguard and Medal of Honor: Airborne, in 2007 EA Los Angeles started to work on a new game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, titled Gunhero. While keeping a first person view as their previous MoH titles, this new project would have been set in a post zombie-apocalypse world, focused on using melee weapons and close quarter combat, somehow preceding what Techland did 4 years later with Dead Island and one year before the release of Left 4 Dead. The project was still in early development and many features were not decided yet, as the plan for a possible coop multiplayer mode, but unfortunately it was cancelled before to be completed. The game was noticed in 2011 by Siliconera after Gunhero’s Art Director Zach Schlappi published a few concept art online.
The main character in Gunhero was a volunteer SAR pilot whose crew fatally died after their Jayhawk was brought down by a rescued survivor who was hiding the zombie infection. Caught in the middle of the quarantine zone, the pilot had to survive through zombies to rescue scientist who may hold a cure.
Even if their early prototype did garnered a lot of internal praise, Dead Space was also pitched to EA during the same time and they decided to cancel Gunhero as there was not room in their portfolio for two survival horror games. Even if Dead Space became a success for EA, the popularity of open world, first person zombie games in the following years marks the cancellation of Gunhero as a huge missed opportunity for the studio.
In 2010 EA Los Angeles would be re-branded as Danger Close Games, but 3 years later after the commercial failure of Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the studio was dissolved and some employees moved to DICE Los Angeles.
After 1 year and half of collective volunteer work during our (not much) spare time, sleepless nights researching, contacting developers and writing about lost games, 40+ authors that contributed with articles… our book is almost complete! Articles, related content and interviews are about 95% ready, all our (last) energies and efforts are focused to be able to publish the book this summer or early autumn. When the content will be 100% complete, we’ll have to insert these 300+ pages into the book layout, adding screenshots, photos, concept arts.. it will still take a while, but as this year is the 15° anniversary of Unseen64, the book will be the best way to celebrate together :)
Now it’s time to find a great front cover for the book… but we suck at drawing, so we’d like to ask to all our readers for help: are you an artist or do you just love to draw random stuff with Paint? Would you like to feature your artwork on the front cover of a book about cancelled games? Send us your artworks!
The plan is to publish 2 versions of the book, one in full color and a cheaper one in black / white interior, so there will be 2 different covers, one for each version. We’d like to reward the authors of the winning covers with a copy of the book: the author of the cover chosen for the the full-color book will receive this version, while the author of the cover for the black / white book will receive the b/w version. Both covers will still be in full color but we will not rule out the possibility to use a black / white cover if there will be a great one.
Naturally as it will be a book about unseen games, we cannot left out all the unused covers: ALL PROPOSED COVERS will still be published in a “lost covers gallery” at the end of the book, with each author’s details, as their name, email and link to their online portfolio, so that readers will be able to admire everyone’s effort and talent.
Cover ideas:
There’s not a specific brief for the cover artwork, so feel free to drawn your own ideas. What would you put on the front cover of a book titled “Videogames you will never play”? There could be a group of characters from some of these lost games (here are some examples) drawn in your own style, a symbolic image with people that cannot play unreleased games or awesome pixel art to show games forgotten in a dusty warehouse, X-Files style. Whatever your imagination can cook up!
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