New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Playstation, Sony

Virus [PSX – Cancelled]

monokoma
28-07-2010
4 Comments

Virus is a cancelled survival horror game that was in development by Sony Interactive Studios America for the original Playstation. Players had to repel an alien virus that invaded a military ship, messing up with human tecnologies, transforming inanimate objects into dangerous enemies (as a big spider-copter hybrid). Virus by SISA should not be confused with Alien Virus, another game that was planned for the PSX by International Computer Entertainment /Vic Tokai (and only released for PC).

Virus was never released for unkown reasons. If you know someone that worked on this game, please let us know!

Here’s the original press-release:

Sony Imagesoft proudly announces the upcoming release of the first computer bug you’ll want to buy, Virus. The PC game version of Virus will debut today at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) hel d in Los Angeles.

Based on the coin-op version of the game — which will be released by Betson Entertainment Technologies later this year — Virus is a first-person arcade-style shooter game that takes place on a hi-tech and heavily armed battleship.

“We’re excited to bring Virus to the PC and PlayStation soon after its arcade release,” said Kelly Flock, president, Sony Imagesoft. “As Virus is originally an arcade game, we’re striving to have tons of fast-paced action with some bizar re creatures lurking around every corner; it will definitely be a kill or be killed game.”

The story line of Virus takes place after the ship’s telecommunication system picks up an alien virus which infects not just the crew and the electronics, but the entire vessel. The virus physically fuses and combines everything it infects into flesh an d metal monsters. Apache helicopters grow spidery legs; crewmen meld with their instruments of death; giant wasps grow machine guns; and, the entire ship is turned into a massive living, thinking war-zone with the player trapped inside.

In Virus, the player will have to fight his way through six sections of the ship, confronting a wide variety of grotesque mutants along the way. For added action, Virus will also have a two-player cooperative mode. The PC version of Virus will ship on two CD-ROMs for IBM-compatible computers and is slated for a Christmas release. A Sony PlayStation version is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 1996.

Celine was able to find some images in CD Consoles #8 and Top Consoles #5 magazines.

Images:

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

Full Throttle 2: Payback [PC PS2 – Cancelled]

monokoma
27-07-2010
1 Comment

Full Throttle: Payback (aka Full Throttle 2) is a cancelled action adventure game that was in development in 2000 by LucasArts, planned to be released for PC and with a rumored Playstation 2 port. As we can read in Wikipedia, the game would have been an official sequel to continue the storyline of the original Full Throttle. Since Tim Schafer had already left the company at the time, Larry Ahern, who was involved in the original game’s development, was appointed the project lead and Bill Tiller, the art director.

At the early stages, the project received positive feedback from other LucasArts employees but according to Tiller, it eventually fell apart because of disagreements on the game style between the productive team and “a particularly influential person” within the management, which lead to a series of “mistakes”. The production ceased in November 2000, when 25% of the levels and about 40% of the preproduction art were complete. Both Ahern and Tiller left LucasArts in 2001, after Payback was canceled.

From Retro Gamer #62 we can read some more info of Payback from Larry Ahern, who designed ‘a version of it that never got off the drawing board before [he] quit, and the bloody remains of it were handed over to another team’. Some of it we already knew from the Classic Adventure Gaming article.

The villain was a Senator with an anti-biker agenda, pushing to replace the worn-out highways with new, biker-unfriendly hover lanes. The game also featured Ben’s estranged weasel-of-a-brother, who was mixed up in one of the Senator’s shady operations, and a more central lead for Father Torque. Maureen had a cameo, but the female lead was a reporter who covers Ben after his subsequent fame for the alleged murder of Malcolm Corley. We had some fun new biker gangs also, like the Dragons, who sported flamethrowers on the handlebars of their bikes, and the Leeches, a gang in rocket-powered side-cars that cruise the highways jumping from vehicle to vehicle and attaching to them to syphon fuel.

Some time later LucasArts decided to start the development on the even more action-heavy Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, that was also cancelled in the end.

Thanks to Robert Seddon and lorenzo55 for the contributions!

Images:

Playstation, Sony

Guilty Gear [PSX – Beta]

monokoma
26-07-2010
No Comments

Guilty Gear​ is a fighting game developed by Arc System Works and released in 1998 for the Playstation. The game  has become famous for it’s great 2D sprites design, but in its early development it had a different graphic style, with pre-rendered characters. Some screens from the beta version of  Gulty Gear can be seen in the gallery below, thanks Saga Darvulia that found them in some old japanese magazines. We can also notice alternate designs for the characters and their weapons!

Guilty Gear Beta:


Guilty Gear Final:

Images:

Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

VX Vampire XDV-7 [N64 – Tech Demo]

monokoma
25-07-2010
11 Comments

VX Vampire (aka Vampire XDV-7 or Ultra Copter 64) is a flight simulator that was planned to be ported to the Nintendo 64 by Paradigm Simulation / Entertainment. Previously Paradigm worked on realistic flight simulation for space, military and aviation clients, but  in 1994 it was contacted by Nintendo to aid in the creation of one of the Nintendo 64’s launch titles, Pilotwings 64. It seems that VX Vampire was originally one of Paradigm’s military simulators, that they though to convert to a more “arcadish” game to enter in the mass-entertainment market.

In 1995 Nintendo / Paradigm send some screens of Vampire XDV-7 to magazines (that you can see preserved in the gallery below), claiming that the Ultra 64 would have been able to achieve similar level of graphic details. In reality, VX Vampire was running on the Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine, the same engine used for the Magic Edge Hornet Simulator Hardware, a technology much more advanced (and expensive) than a normal Nintendo 64.

When Paradigm had to finish Pilotwings 64 in time for the release of the N64 in june 1996, they probably had to shift resources to Nintendo’s project and the VX Vampire XDV-7 port went on-hold. In the end Pilotwings 64 was a critical and commercial success for the developer, causing the simulation and entertainment divisions of Paradigm to separate and focus on their respective products. The newly independent Paradigm Entertainment continued to develop for Nintendo’s 64-bit console. [Info from Wikipedia]

Some years later, Paradigm Entertainment announced Harrier 2000 / 2001 for the Nintendo 64, a new flight game that sadly was never released. It’s possible that their plan to port VX Vampire XDV-7 changed when they understood that it would have been too difficult to convert an Onyx simulator to an N64, so the project evolved into a new, different title: Harrier 2000.

Thanks to jorcyd and Celine for the contribution! Scans from Cd Consoles #4, Console Plus #49 and Edge #29

Images:

Videos (@ 04:10)

Others, PC / MAC

Painkiller: Resurrection [PC – Beta / Concept]

monokoma
25-07-2010
No Comments

As we can read on Wikipedia, Painkiller: Resurrection is FPS developed by Homegrown Games and published by JoWooD. It is a stand-alone expansion to the 2004 Painkiller developed by People Can Fly, and runs on an updated version of the Painkiller engine. Resurrection was released for the PC on October 2009, with a planned Xbox 360 port that was never released.

As noted by Vicente, the main character had a different design in the beta version:

Beta:


Final: