New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Nintendo, Unseen Articles, Wii, Wii U

The Wonderful 101 [Beta / Prototype / Concept – Wii U]

Liam Robertson
24-10-2014
4 Comments

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The Wonderful 101 is an action game for the Wii U, developed by Platinum Games in partnership with Nintendo and was directed by famed Japanese designer, Hideki Kamiya, of Okami and Devil May Cry notoriety. It was released in 2013 and has since developed a small cult following among Wii U owners.

The game follows the adventures of The Wonderful 100, a team of superheroes, as they fight to defend Earth from an alien menace known as the ‘GEATHJERK Federation‘. Despite being released almost a full year into the Wii U’s lifespan, the project had, in fact, been in the works for a few years prior. As revealed by the staff who worked on it over the course of its development, its direction underwent some considerable shifts along the way.

Video Game All Stars, Unite Up!

As disclosed by Hideki Kamiya at Gamescom 2013, The Wonderful 101 began life as an entirely different entity. Kamiya’s involvement with the project started a few years earlier, when the President and CEO of Platinum Games, Tatsuya Minami, tasked him with creating an action game with a cast of some of gaming’s biggest icons. It was set to feature Nintendo characters primarily, as well as guest stars from third party companies.

The project in this form dates all the way back to 2010, when it was planned to be developed not on Wii U, but on the Wii.

“At that time it wasn’t necessarily based on any specific platform. But when we took it to Nintendo, the discussions went from there, and we decided to put it on Wii.” – Hideki Kamiya, on the first iteration of The Wonderful 101 project.

Although it has been never stated which characters from companies outside of Nintendo were planned, Kamiya did elaborate on the main cast of this original vision at 2013’s Penny Arcade Expo. During an interview with Siliconera, he mentioned that Link and Mario were among those featured. This suggests that the two might have been the basis for the ‘Unite Hand’ and ‘Unite Sword’ moves, based upon the traits of either character.

“Initially, the idea was proposed by Mr. Minami, to create a game featuring Nintendo characters or other popular characters together in one game. With the idea of putting characters like Mario and Link into the same game, you end up with a situation where fans of Mario are forced to play as Link.“

Moreover, during Platinum’s panel at the event, Kamiya described one piece of concept art for the project, involving other Mario characters. He gave the example of a portion where Peach, Luigi and Yoshi attempt to grab hold of one another to form a bridge, with Mario hopping across the top of them, allowing him to traverse a large bottomless pit. One artist, Kibbles, has put together a sketch for us to illustrate what this roughly might have looked like.

Wonderful 101 mario bridge concept

It appears that this idea might well have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The director went on to to say that the people at Nintendo viewing this concept in particular was the point at which they decided the project could not be realised. Read more

Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Tintin [PS2 – Cancelled Prototype]

yota
20-10-2014
1 Comment

Before going bankrupt, Appeal, the same software house behind the unreleased Outcast II, developed a prototype for a new action game based on the Tintin comic books:

After the Outcast II debacle (see the related article here), we were offered a share buy-back option by our publisher (Infogrames) in exchange of a new pre-production contract around a Tintin game. As we had to keep our studio alive, we bought back the shares at a nominal price and got the contract started.

The budget was tight and the timing was short, so we tried to reuse a number of ressources from the Outcast II prototype and build on top of that. The game was to be fully 3D exploration with some action scenes and mini-games.

Unfortunately the publisher, Infogrames, couldn’t reach a deal with Moulinsart, the french foundation that manages the TinTin franchise, thus destroying Appeal’s last chance to recover.

For more informations check Franck Sauer’s Website.

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Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony

Jak & Daxter 4 [PS3 – Cancelled / Concept]

monokoma
16-10-2014
1 Comment

Before to fully work on  The Last of Us, Naughty Dog was planning to create a new, even more grittier Jak and Daxter game for the Playstation 3, but after the concept art team drawn some Jak and Daxter artworks to use in this “reboot” of the series, they thought that they would have more freedom to just create a new IP for the mature audience, and thus the project evolved to became The Last of Us. After Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3, this project could have been the 4° title in the main Jak series (or even the 5th one if you consider Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier). In the end, Naughty Dog never released any new Jak & Daxter game for the PS3, only an HD collection with their first 3 PS2 games.

At the IGDA Toronto 2013 Keynote, Neil Druckmann (Creative Director & Writer from Naughty Dog) talked about this cancelled Jak & Daxter concept:

Our task was to reboot Jak & Daxter. We spent a lot of time exploring the world of Jak and Daxter and how we would reboot it; how we would bring these characters back, some story ideas that we were getting excited about.

As much as we like these concepts and exploring these fantastical worlds, we found the ideas that we were getting passionate about were getting away from Jak & Daxter. We were questioning ourselves, were we doing this for marketing reasons and naming something Jak & Daxter when it really isn’t Jak & Daxter, or were we really passionate about it?

As we can read at GameInformer:

Shelving the Jak and Daxter ideas meant the team could begin work on a fresh idea. Shedding the restrictions of an existing IP allowed directors Druckmann and Straley to let their creative juices flow and explore whatever they wished.

Some concept arts from this cancelled “Jak & Daxter 4” project were shown by Neil Druckmann at the IGDA Toronto, in the “A Tribute to Naughty Dog: 30th Anniversary” exhibition in september / october 2014 and in the “Naughty Dog’s 30th Anniversary” art book (you can buy it on Amazon UK for 20.39£, Amazon USA for 25$ or Amazon IT for 32 euro), as posted by Junkie Monkeys!

Thanks to Loïc Caria for the contribution!

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

Saints Row: The Cooler [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3]

Liam Robertson
13-10-2014
1 Comment

Saints Row: The Cooler is a cancelled fighting game, which was in development for the Xbox 360 and PS3. It was being created by Heavy Iron Studios in Los Angeles and was funded by THQ.

“It was a brawler game. Go to a bar, pick a fight, smash a bottle over someone’s head” – Former Heavy Iron Studios artist

Work began on the title in March 2010 at developer, Heavy Iron. In partnership with THQ, the company sought to create the first Saints Row game controlled entirely by motion; a ploy to capitalise on the rising industry trend at the time.

Two versions of the game were planned initially: an Xbox 360 game using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral and a PS3 port with Playstation Move support. The Xbox 360 was the lead development platform for The Cooler, as the team’s creative focus was very much on Kinect.

A team of around 40 people were put on the project, while the rest of the studio was occupied with another Kinect-centric project for Disney called ‘E-Ticket’.

We were able to get in touch with several people, a mix of both former and current employees at the developer, who shared some details with us on the game’s lifecycle. According to these sources, the title was a brawler set in the Saint’s Row universe and was, in contrast with the rest of the series, not an open world game.

“It was a ton of fun to work on because we got to use the original Saint’s Row locales as concept art, basically, and give them a redesign and a highly upgraded art treatment (since Saint’s Row was open world and our game was not, we could afford to devote more time and engine resources to artwork)”

Saints Row The Cooler

One of the gritty environments of Saints Row: The Cooler

Kinect lap dancing

Despite it ditching the free roaming traditions of the previous games, The Cooler apparently offered a myriad of activities to experience. Its main premise was of motion-controlled fighting in various parts of the Saints Row universe, but players would have also been able to compete in poker tournaments and other miscellaneous mini-games. Read more

Unseen News

Would you support Unseen64 with Patreon for 1$ a month?

U64 Staff & Contributors
08-10-2014
No Comments

Lately Patreon (thanks to Farel for the suggestion!) is becoming more and more used by small, independent gaming websites to rise support and monthly donations to be able to pay the site server and to create better content. Some good examples are HG101 and Tiny Cartridge.

Patreon lets readers support their favorite websites by becoming patrons, giving a small donation every month, automatically through paypal / credit card. Unlike other fundraising services (for example Kickstarter), which raise lots of money for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who publish online a stream of smaller works, like website updates, articles, researches, and need just little money every month. Empowering a new generation of creators, Patreon is bringing patronage back to the 21st century.

The new server that hosts Unseen64 costs about 300$ a year. U64 is an independent site. No money is generated from our work so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves, with the help of a few awesome supporters. Some years ago we had Google Adsense banners that helped a bit to get money to pay the server, but then Google banned us because we write about prototypes and rom-hacks, even if we don’t host those files on our server.

If you want to help Unseen 64 to survive and if you can donate some of your love every month, we would like to try to rise monthly contributions through Patreon. You can just donate how much or little you want, and you can cancel your pledge at any point if you’re low on cash or have a change of heart. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the U64 Archive. Patreon takes 5% and the creators cover the credit card transaction fees which are generally 4%, so we would see around $0.90 of every dollar.

We’d like to open different Milestone Goals, so for example if we are able to get 25 patrons to donate 1$ a month, we can pay the U64 server for another year and write weekly updates, if we are able to rise 100$ a month we could publish an Unseen64 Book with articles and insights about cancelled videogames (something like HCG101’s “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers”, but with more engrish), if we are able to rise 2.000$ a month (LOL), we could pay our best contributors for more good articles and work on Unseen64 24/7 for daily updates on the site, deeper researches on lost videogames, create videos, interviews with forgotten developers, etc.

We also would like to offer special gifts for people that donate more than 1$ a month, for example we could share exclusive / early access videos with people that donate 10$ a month, to send a physical copy of our (potential) U64 book to who donate 25$ a month, to work on dedicated articles and special requests for who donates 50$ a month, and so on.

Before to organize a Patreon account, we’d like to do a poll to see if this idea could be useful to support Unseen 64. What do you think? Would you support U64 trough Patreon with 1$ or more a month? What would like to see as “special gift” and “Milestone Goals”? Give your vote and comment below!