New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Star Trek Elite Force 2 [PC – Beta]

Star Trek: Elite Force 2 is a FPS developed by Ritual Entertainment and published in 2003 by Activision for PC. As we can read in wikipedia, towards the end of March 2002, rumors were reported that a sequel to Elite Force was in development. The game was the last Star Trek title to be developed under Activision’s supervision, following a dispute with Star Trek licensing holder Viacom.

In the gallery below you can see the first screenshots released for Star Trek: Elite Force 2, with an early engine and incomplete graphic (as a place holder HUD). Check the video below to compare it with the beta screens: if you notice more differences, please let us know!

Thanks to discworld for the contribution!

Images:

Video (from the final version):

 

It’s summertime, see you in september!

Is it too hot to work? Does the summer call you to the beach or to the mountains for a lengthy retreat? Well, the Unseen 64 Staff is going in vacation, too! We really need a vacation. From tomorrow (1th of August) Unseen 64 will be in “Summer Break Mode 2010”, we are going to relax somewhere around the world and dream about beta games while we are swimming in the ocean or walking in the mountain woods.

Don’t worry! We’ll be back the 6th of September with all the beta updates and unseen news. In the meantime, there are still lots of things to do around here while we are away:

Look and read: Check our archive of beta and cancelled games and read our articles.

Contribute: Would you like to help the U64 Archive? Read how you can help us to preserve more beta screens, videos and info!

Interact: Join the U64 Forum to discuss about unseen games with other geeks! We’ll post some updates and unseen-news in the forum while the site will be in summer  break mode.

Share: Do you have a website or a blog? Spread the unseen! Add www.unseen64.net to your blogroll or in your links page, write a post about lost games, talk about U64 with your friends, and share your beta-geekness. If more people know about this site, we could have more contributions and the archive can grow with more screens, videos, and info!

Thanks to everyone that supports U64 with love. See you all very soon!

The Unseen 64 Staff

Terminus [Saturn, Playstation, PC – Cancelled]

Terminus is a cancelled action adventure / shooter game that was in development by Scavenger Inc for the Sega Saturn, Playstation and PC in 1996. As they wrote in their press release, the project was meant “to give Tomb Raider a run for it’s money” but sadly it was already too late, as the company ran out of money and Terminus had to be canned.

The few screenshots preserved in the gallery below show a great graphic engine for its time, that used NURBS / voxel-like system, as we can read in an article from Gamasutra (wrote by a former Scavenger developer):

[…] Soon thereafter we were asked to develop our own game. That provided me with the incentive to figure out how to represent characters in a game better. We knew we wanted at least ten or more characters on the screen simultaneously, but all the low-resolution polygonal characters we had seen just didn’t cut it. So I decided to keep pursuing a solution based on what I had been working on for X-Men (32X), hoping that I’d come up with something that would eventually yield better results.

At first I flirted with a voxel-like solution, and developed a character system which was shown at E3 in 1996 in a game called Terminus. This system allowed a player to see characters from any angle rotating around one axis, which solved a basic problem inherent to sprite-based systems. Still, you couldn’t see the character from any angle, and while everybody liked the look of the “sprite from any angle” solution, many people wanted to get a closer look at the characters’ faces. This caused the whole voxel idea to fall apart.

In 1997 / 1998, Scavenger went bankrupt and all their unfinished projects vanished with them. The team behind Terminus (internally known as Team Fetus) was then hired at Shiny Entertainment and their game was resurrected somehow, evolving into Messiah.

Thanks a lot to Mike Damien for its help in preserving some info and concept arts from this lost project!

Thanks to Celine for the contributions! Scans from GameFan 4-2 and EDGE 34

Images:

Hell’s Deep [PS2 PC – Cancelled]

Hell’s Deep is a cancelled action adventure that was in development in 2002 by Qube Software for the Playstation 2 and PC. The project was meant to be an ambitious sandbox game, similar to GTA3, but set in a big medieval city, during a dark and menacing time. As the main focus of Qube has always been the development of 3D software for 3D middleware and not games,  they probably found some problems during the development and Hell’s Deep was soon cancelled. Only few artworks and some 3D models are archived in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.

Thanks to Sewia for the contribution!

Images:

Area 51 [PS2 XBOX – Cancelled]

Area 51 is a cancelled action / shooter game planned for Playstation 2 and Xbox that was in development by Midway Games West in 2000/2001. It was meant to be a direct successor to Atari’s 1995 light gun shooter which saw a re-release on PlayStation, PC and Saturn in the same year.

Sadly in 2003 Midway Games West closed down and only in 2005 Midway Studios Austin released a loose remake of the 1995 game and in 2007 another sequel called Blacksite: Area 51. We can assume that Area 51 2005 is a completely different project than the 2000 / 2001 one, as the development teams were different.

It’s interesting to notice that in 1998 / 1999 Midway Games West also worked on Area 51: Grey Dawn, an unreleased arcade brawler that could have been re-used as a base to create the concept for their cancelled Area 51 for Xbox and PS2. The only video preserved from the 2000 / 2001 project looks infact a mix between a shooter and a traditional beat ’em up. If you have more info on this lost game, please let us know!

Video: