News on Cancelled Video Games & Lost Media

Breakaway is a canceled team-based multiplayer brawler game published by Amazon Game Studios and developed by Amazon Game Studios Orange County (formerly Double Helix Games) from 2014 to 2018, exclusively for PC.

Breakaway was officially revealed in September 2016, during the TwitchCon as we can read on MMOculture:

Amazon Game Studios, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Amazon, today announced several new online games, the first titled Breakaway. Breakaway is a 4 vs 4 mythological brawler where players assemble a team from a roster of legendary warriors, including the relentless gladiator Spartacus, the twisted sorceress Morgan Le Fay, and the bloodthirsty warlord Vlad the Impaler.
At the start of each round, warriors can summon persistent buildables onto the playing field that dynamically alter the game. Buildables can besiege foes, shield teammates, or create new pathways through the arena. Players battle across several fabled locations such as El Dorado, Atlantis, and Styx to control the Relic, defending it from attackers, and smashing it into an opponent’s base.
Breakaway is powered by Amazon Lumberyard and integrates directly with Twitch (also owned by Amazon). Breakaway introduces four new ways for the Twitch community to interact with broadcasters.
Metastream allows streamers to customize their broadcasts with real-time stat overlays.
Broadcaster Match Builder lets broadcasters invite their followers to join their matches.
Broadcaster Spotlight adds to the excitement of streaming. It tells players when they’re in a match that’s being broadcast, and lets them follow the broadcaster with a single click.
Stream+ gives broadcasters new ways to interact with their viewers through polls, and by allowing viewers to wager loyalty points that are redeemable for in-game rewards.

The game went into playable alpha in December 2016 and Polygon was able to write a short preview about it:

We got to go hands-on with Breakaway at Amazon Game Studios recently and were pleasantly surprised by the game’s depth, considering how easy it was to pick up and play. The game’s heroes include a mix of archetypical warriors, like the tank class Black Knight, melee swordsman Spartacus and spellcaster Morgan Le Fay, who do battle on fabled battlegrounds such as El Dorado and Atlantis.
Each hero has a pair of structures he or she can build, including turrets, walls and healing shrines. Players can build one structure per round to cut off routes or support their allies in a push into the enemy’s base. Adding to the depth are upgrades that players can purchase mid-game with gold they earn over the course of battle. There’s a complexity in Breakaway underpinning the brawling, relic-running action, but with a little coaching from the developer, much of it was easy to grasp within an hour or so.
While securing the relic and dunking it into the enemy’s home base is the primary goal, players can score through other means. A full-team kill will also win your team a round. And if the in-game clock ticks down to zero and you’ve got control of the relic on your opponent’s half of the map, you’ll win that round. Those two scoring opportunities make for some of the best, most nail-biting moments in Breakaway, as you either frantically try to hunt down the last surviving player on the enemy team before the others respawn, or desperately pass the relic to your teammates to secure field position.

After months of playable alpha, however, Amazon took the decision in October 2017 to make a major overhaul on its gameplay, after they already made one for its playable heroes some months before, as we can still read on Polygon:

Amazon Game Studios’ competitive sports brawler with a mythological twist, Breakaway, is getting a major overhaul, the studio said today. After a months-long public alpha test, Amazon says its going to take time to “iterate and evolve” Breakaway’s core gameplay.
And it sounds like the Breakaway team intends to go a bit dark while that happens.
“Over the course of the Alpha we received a lot of feedback from you that we’re taking to heart,” the Breakaway team said in a post on the game’s website. “In order to get it right, we’re letting our team take the time to iterate and evolve Breakaway’s core gameplay to deliver what you’ve asked for. We aren’t sure how long this will take, but we think it’s the right thing to do for the game, and you, the community.
“We won’t be hosting Alpha matches during this time, but we still want to hear your ideas for how to improve the game, and we’ll share our ideas for your feedback.”
The Breakaway public alpha ran from June to September. The game had been playable on PC in private alpha tests prior to that, but in June, Amazon made major changes to Breakaway’s gameplay and its playable heroes. The studio shifted away from characters based on historical and legendary figures to more fantasy-based heroes, with an art overhaul to match.

Unfortunately, in March 2018, only 5 months after the announcement of the overhaul, the project was ultimately cancelled, again, covered by Polygon:

Amazon’s in-house game studio has put an end to development on Breakaway, the competitive fantasy sport brawler that Amazon Game Studios announced in 2016. In a statement posted to Reddit, developers announced that the game is “no longer in active development.”
Breakaway’s cancellation was confirmed this past weekend. Amazon Game Studios’ previous update on the game indicated that the development team was overhauling the title and taking “the time to iterate and evolve Breakaway’s core gameplay.” That was in the wake of a softer reboot of the game that amplified the game’s fantasy elements and redesigned its cast of characters.
Here’s Amazon Game Studios’ update on Breakaway from the game’s subreddit:
Since our last announcement, we have worked to implement community feedback and iterate on Breakaway’s core gameplay. While we have developed many ideas and made a lot of progress, we are also setting a very high bar for ourselves. In spite of our efforts, we didn’t achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. After a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas. As a result, Breakaway is no longer in active development.

The beginning in the video game industry by a giant like Amazon was mostly tumultuous: in addition to the cancellation of Breakaway, the company took 6 years to develop another multiplayer game, Crucible, released in May 2020, before being shutted down in November of the same year. Their other game, New World, was released in September 2021, after also experiencing some setbacks during its development.

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PC / MAC

Unknown Heroes (Mindware Studios) [PC? /PS3? /Xbox 360? – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

25-12-2022

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Unknown Heroes is a canceled World War II Role-Playing Game developed by Mindware Studios, around 2005-2006. Platforms were never mentionned.

Very few information are currently available for this game. It was first mentionned in September 2008, on the Czech website Visiongame during an interview of Mindware’s lead designer Nikola Matoušková while talking about another cancelled project, Voodoo Nights:

V.G.: Not so long ago, Voodoo Nights was remembered in an article about canceled projects. No one really showed interest in such an interesting game?
N.M.: Many people showed interest, many publishers were even enthusiastic. But as I said before, pushing a new IP address is nearly impossible these days. Especially for a small business in the East. There were a lot of negotiations going on, but in the end, it all kind of fell apart. After a while, one of our main stakeholders came up with the game Army of Two, which had an almost identical concept. Interesting coincidence. And we had more of those irons in the fire, for example the very promising WWII epic RPG Unknown Heroes. There, too, all the negotiations kind of burned out in a weird way. Now I’m still waiting for another big publisher to unexpectedly release this game.

Years later, a low resolution gameplay video was published by one of the folks from Visiongame, showing what looked like a tactical squad based Third-Person Shooter:

During their existence, Mindware had another project that got canceled, with their MMOFPS Mindhack.

If you know someone who worked on Unknown Heroes and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Zombies: The Awakening (Krysalide) [PC/XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

22-12-2022

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Zombies: The Awakening is a canceled survival-horror first-person shooter developed by Krysalide for the PC, Playstation 2 and Xbox around 2003-2004 for a release planned in the beginning of 2005.

Using the Unreal Engine 2, Zombies: The Awakening was the first game from a small team composed of 15 people. Few is known about the game itself apart from the official announcement on the old website that we can now find everywhere on the Internet:

“Mix of FPS and survival/horror. Balance between action and adventure to offer a varied experience to the player.
Interactive use of the surroundings in order to survive in the besieged town : find objects to block paths, use electricity or gaz to forge a path to freedom. Find food and medication to save your skin and that of other survivors.
Beware the contamination… zombies attacks will slowly turn you into one of them… See your body changing, becoming slow and clumsy, but also more resistant to bullets and other attacks. But will you find a cure in time ? Find medikits, ingredients to a serum and use the sickness to your advantage.
Find other survivors. Each will bring new skills in medication, combat, electronics… and each one will have a different personnality and weaponry.
When ammo is sparse, use other mayhem devices : electric drill, molotov cocktail, and many more…

Half of the city is plunged in darkness. If you want to avoid surprises, find reliable light sources.

20 hours of intense gameplay, 11 levels to test your survival instincts, 20 weapons and 12 sidekicks.
Various and dangerous enemies, with different behaviors and intelligence. Hordes of living dead, squad based military, zombies, and bikers from hell ready to plunder town…”

On December 2003, a developer from Krysalide was interviewed by Ownt and shared more about the game:

“Zombies is a first-person shooter created to replicate the vibe of Resident Evil while offering the freedom of movement of a first-person game. Krysalide hopes to avoid the heavyweight competition of FPS by standing out for the gameplay peculiar to any good survival horror game.
The game will last about 15 hours and will be a series of missions and puzzles placed on a linear frame. Each mission will allow you to meet a new secondary character with his own weapon and special skills.
The project is ambitious, especially since it is planned to integrate into the game a substantial multiplayer part that the developer of Krysalide compares to Counter Strike with zombies in the center and on each side of the character classes (bikers, soldiers, police officers, survivors).”

However, after some gameplay was revealed initially on February 2004, the game vanished before French website NoFrag was informed from the CEO of Krysalide himself, Loïc Barrier, that it was definitely canceled due to lack of publishers interested in the project:

It’s been a year since we last talked about Zombies: The Awakening, and for a good reason: today I had confirmation from Loïc Barrier, the boss of Krysalide, that the game will never be released. It was canceled, apparently a while ago, when Krysalide realized that no publisher would accept the project as the developer had designed it.

We can speculate that it was too ambitious for a first game from a small team of 15 people that had never made before their own game.

After the cancellation of Zombies: The Awakening, Krysalide would still work as an outsource company on various projects made by French developers such as The Crew and Dishonored 2 before disappearing.

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Time0 (ZootFly) [X360/PS3 – Cancelled]

monokoma

22-12-2022

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Time0 is a canceled action game developed by ZootFly for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 platforms, alongside potentially a Nintendo Wii version, from 2006 to 2008.

As we coul read on old ZootFly’s website, Time0 followed the adventure of Zed Condor, an urban explorer and Violet Munro, an investigative reporter who got trapped deep in the shadow world of a parallel New York. The city itself is a giant war machine threatening to wipe out our world. They have three days to stop it.

“Time0 is a daring and upbeat action adventure about two diehard New York City urban explorers. They discover an entrance to a parallel world in which an army of enslaved people is building replicas of cities in order to launch a Trojan horse invasion on Earth and other worlds.”
“There’s the exploration spirit of unknown worlds, the audacity of the greatest movie adventures, and the roughness of gritty urban TV series.”

Time0 had a pretty messy development story, as the creation of this game came from the ashes of another canceled project from ZootFly, a title based on the Ghostbusters license. According to Bostjan Troha, founder and president of ZootFly, for Gamespot, this game was in development from May to July 2006 before being postponed because of IP issues:

“Over the weekend, Ghostbusters fans were aflutter with some videos that appeared on YouTube. The clips showed footage of a game based on the 1984 sci-fi comedy film. But instead of featuring fish-out-of-water geeks awkwardly shooting from their proton packs, the videos showed Gears of War-style gameplay, massive destruction, and a gritty New York cityscape.
The videos were posted by the game’s developer, Slovenia-based ZootFly, who later admitted that the Xbox 360 game was merely a prototype and that intellectual-property issues momentarily sidelined its development.
Bostjan: “The development started in May 2006 and was put on the back burner in July 2006, at which point we shifted the focus to Time0, a Ghostbusters-inspired game. The engine is based off of a common code base we have at ZootFly. After our previous titles were released it was upgraded to next-gen to run a prototype of World War III, a game where the US and Europe duke it out. The Ghostbusters footage was running on an intermediate build of the engine that now powers Time0 which is a third-person action game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and hopefully for the Wii. It is in part based on a true story about two urban explorers that disappeared in New York City in August 2006, while exploring a Harlem basement rumored to house an ancient portal into the parallel world. We started prototyping in summer last year. The development of a 20-minute vertical slice of Time0 started in late October 2006. Right now it’s hard to tell when it’s gonna be complete. Currently, we are actively looking for a worldwide publishing deal for Time0.”

Early 2007, ZootFly posted three teaser videos about Time0. After that, the game disappeared from the radar during an entire year before Gematsu revealed in May 2008 that the title was still in development and that the developer was trying to negotiate with publishers:

“We’re still talking to… how shall I put it… two of the top four publishers about publishing Time0,” said Troha. “The 20th Century Fox title will be announced by Brash Entertainment sometime in summer. Unfortunately that’s all I am allowed to disclose.”

Unfortunately, Time0 was never mentioned again thereafter. A few years later, a new video showing gameplay was uploaded in addition to new screenshots, unclear as to whether this was a new attempt to revive the project or if it was an old prototype before it’s cancellation. We notice that the appearance of the protagonist has been totally changed, as Chentzilla pointed out in the comments, it borrowed a lot from the main character of the game Mistmare, which was developed by people who would later found ZootFly.

After developing Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death, ZootFly was acquired in 2013 by the company Interblock, specialized in casino games.

Thanks to Chentzilla for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Terra: Formations (Starcave Entertainment) [X360/PS3/PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

21-12-2022

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Terra: Formations is a canceled first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements developed by Cellien Studios, a two men team subdivision of game company Star Cave Studios, for PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 systems, from 2004 to 2017.

The game was first revealed in the beginning of 2005 by Cellien as a multiplayer FPS using the Torque Engine:

“We at Cellien Studios are developing a game on the Torque game Engine from www.garagegames.com. Terra: Formations is a Sci-Fi FPS game that will be played online much like Unreal Tournament style. The project website is www.terrathegame.com and our studio website is www.cellienstudios.com. So far our studio only consists of two people but for a two man team and only 5 months of development I feel confident that we will be able to release a demo in the coming months so keep an eye out.”

After a year of silence, Gamesindustry announced Terra: Formations, now headed by Star Cave Studios:

“Irish Star Cave Studios Limited proudly announces the development of its first “AAA” title and first multiplatform game, Terra: Formations! In Terra: Formations, players have the freedom to select their preferred style of game play, ranging from high action First Person Shooter (FPS) to more strategic Real-Time Strategy (RTS) in a ranking system set up much like a Role-Playing Game (RPG)! It’s the clash of the titans when it comes to game genres; FPS, RTS and RPG – all tied together in this awesome looking fast-paced, action packed, futuristic Massive Multimedia Online Game (MMOG), also featuring single-player options and adventure elements!
By the year 2157, mankind had depleted the resources of planet earth with his lust for power, technological advancements and greed. Ironically, the very machines that played a role in mankind’s irrevocable position were the only chance of survival! After several years of uncertainty, hope was reborn with the efforts of the Global Military Alliance to Terraform one of earth’s celestial neighbours, Jupiter’s moon called “Europa”. It wasn’t until the excavation of the satellite’s icy crust that mankind learned the truth; he was not alone and something, somewhere, was waiting, watching, learning and preparing for battle!
As a player in Terra: Formations, you join the ranks of an elite military force with the objective of reshaping the environments of inhospitable worlds, experience the evolution of a developing planet, and take command to become humanities only hope for survival in an epic struggle for control of the solar system.
Four classes of characters offer different insight to the chaotic world, each providing a unique blend of interaction. The Soldier faction allows for adrenaline pumping action that players have come to expect from traditional FPS games. As a member of the Engineer class, the player becomes the key element in the development of the environment by constructing and repairing mankind’s lifeline to the world. The Researcher class explores the evolution of the world to enhance society’s tools and develop new technology, and finally the player can opt to take command of the action from the perspective of the Commander class to bring order to an uncertain future, tying RTS elements into Terra: Formations.
Star Cave Studios Limited is a privately owned game development studio based in Ireland, and the cream of Irish developers! Founded in June 2004 by industry veteran Keith Killilea, CEO, its focus is to create state-of-the-art computer games targeted not only at the PC platform, but also the next generation gaming consoles! During the course of 2005, Star Cave Studios Limited acquired Cellien Studios, based in Austin Texas, and Single Cell Games, based in Australia, and has now become the leader of Irish game development!”

After that announce, however, the game was put on-hold indefinitely, before surprisingly coming back from the dead in September 2012 on platforms such as Steam Greenlight and Indiegogo, using this time the Unreal Engine 3:

“In Terra: Formations, players have the freedom to select their preferred style of game play, ranging from intense action First-Person Shooter to more strategic RTS planning in an online multi-player universe.”
The key concepts of Terra can be summarized by the conflicting species, player classes, life forms, technology, locations, and gameplay that are designed to make a genre hybrid, player driven world possible.”
Terra: Formations main features:
Rich, highly detailed, atmospheric and wonderful alien enviroments
Changing environments reflecting your terraforming progress, becoming more habitable and supportive of your species requirements. Tug of War gameplay.
Permanent changes in environments – terraforming levels will remember your changes.
Groundbreaking genre crossing gameplay, combining First Person Shooter with Real-Time Strategy.
Highly detailed player characters, with customizable appearances
RTS online gameplay where you give real players control commands.
Advanced AI Droids for FPS defending & RTS resource play.
4 distinct classes of characters; Soldier (FPS), Commander (RTS), Builder (FPS+RTS), and Medic (FPS).
Hi Tech Weaponry & Several Ground / Air Vehicles
Commander Special Attacks such as air-strikes, cloaking, superweapons.
Aliens have the ability to turn Humans by infestation into fellow Aliens.
Global online points & stats system.
Open Mod System allowing map makers to create new worlds.
“The game was announced back in 2006 for all major platforms from PC to Consoles and the screenshots you see in the Gallery tab at the top of this page is the playable demo from back then! We spared no expense to create “AAA” class graphics, code, game-play and pulled all-nighters with barely no lives at all. To develop the whole game we needed a publisher and in the end Terra needed to be put on hold – until now!“

On the Indiegogo page, we could read further details on the company and some ideas behind that game:

“Based on our funding target, we would expect to nail the deadline for Beta Release in late 2013. We know exactly what we are doing, and as Terra has been many years in the making, we are confident in our deadlines! We will keep you in the loop with our development at all times, and give you a look into the process and progress we are making.”
“Example of how amazing Terra will be, your playing on the multi-player level and the world around not just changes due to the terra-forming but stays changed even when you return later to it! We want to bring you an experience of game-play not done before and a dynamic living world you would expect to be on.”

Unfortunately, the crowdfunding campaign wasn’t a success, the game only collected 75$ on a fixed goal of 175,000. After this failed campaign, Terra: Formations disappeared again, but attended a third comeback, this time in the beginning of 2014. Rebranded as T.E.R.R.A. and using Unity as new engine, the project was slightly different about what was initially planned from it’s former form and was, once again, put on Steam Greenlight:

“We are an small team of 4 so far working on this title but if we are funded we can bring in extra help from our peers to bring the game to an completion stage. For the past few years the game evolved from it’s concept of different demo versions towards today, believe me we have had plenty of time to do trial & error on blending the genre’s! We ended up with the finish concept after all of this to what it is now, so much had changed we changed the name to the current form to represent this.”

The developers managed to release it in Early Access around Spring 2016, but in April 2017, as we could read on the comments section, Starcave decided to rebuild the game to it’s core in order to get significant improvements:

“There was a break in the development, where we were reviewing everything of the Early Access release build and have decided to rebuild the core to make better improvements for between EA to Full release to be as smooth as possible. More updates will appear as soon.”

It will never materialize and, since then, Starcave disappeared from the picture alongside T.E.R.R.A. which isn’t playable anymore.

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