New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

RS Links: the unreleased Burnout Paradise’s content

Over at the official Burnout / Criterion blog, they wrote a post about planned Download Content that was meant to be released for Burnout Paradise, as new tracks, modes and vehicles, but for some reasons they never finish them.

We were very interested in the whole concept of downloadable content, and we knew that we wanted to approach it very differently and push it as far as we could. A downloadable Island was started almost immediately after the main game was built.

[…]

We did have ambitious plans for a series of Islands. One was going to be purely off-road based. Hence we created the ‘Dust Storm’ dune buggy in anticipation for that. Our original dreams for Paradise were to create a series of Islands, all connected to Paradise City and each would focus on a different style of racing game. One Island was going to be completely circuit based – and be all marked up like a modern Formula One circuit!

[…]

Planes. A lot of Burnout fans already know about this – as we showed flying around in a live podcast. It was really cool to be able to see Paradise City from the air. It did not happen because of the way the game world was built. The city was never meant to be seen from such viewpoints. Think of it like a film set, a very big film set – meant to be seen from certain camera angles and not others.

[…]

The Moon! Again, completely true. Someone on the team said that ‘players want the moon on a stick when it comes to DLC’ We thought that was funny and thought we’d do it. The actual surface of the real Moon was modelled and it was drive-able. Lunar Challenges would have been totally unexpected – as would have been zero gravity Takedowns and Challenges.

[…]

Time Travel – Not many know about this, but it was discussed. On a certain day, a time portal would have opened on the Island. When you jumped through, you would have found yourself on Big Surf, at another point in history. Maybe the Wild West…you could have done some Challenges and then jumped back.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!

Sticky Balls [PSP – Cancelled]

Sticky Balls is a cancelled puzzle game that was in development for the PSP.  As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was developed by Zed Two initially for Pocket PCs. After Zed Two was bought out by Warthog, a new version was in development for the PSP, until Warthog was bought out by Tiger Telematics and development was switched to the Gizmondo. The game was finally published for the Gizmondo, but it was different from the PSP one (that before being cancelled became more similar to Monkey Balls / Kororinpa).

At the Pickford Bros website (that worked on Sticky Balls) we can read some more info on its development:

Designed with the Pocket PC’s touch screen in mind, the game was prototyped on the PC in Blitz Basic and given to friends and people in the office to play, and even made available for free download from zedtwo.com, but not neccessarily intended as commercial product. The demo ended up being passed around the UK video game industry, and in response to the surprising popularity we developed the game a little further, and opened a website to keep track of hi-score tables.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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Road Riot 4WD [MD/G – Cancelled]

A Genesis / Mega Drive version of Road Riot 4WD was in development at Tengen in 1993, but it was later cancelled. The game is an arcade racing game somehow similar to Mario Kart. A SNES (1992) and an Arcade (1991) versions do exist, but while the SNES version doesnt look that good, the Genesis one seems to have been graphically more similar to the Arcade game. It’s currently unknown if the canned game would have had new tracks. Some images were found in Joypad magazine #7, EGM # 40 and # 41!

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Division 9 [PC/X360? – Cancelled]

What we have here is an unreleased game by Irrational Games, known as Division 9. The premise for this game is similar to the Left 4 Dead franchise, it featured a co-op survival style gameplay, in a mass city with Zombies as the main antagonists. It also featured complex FPS elements such as game changing missions, one instance being a situation where you could turn on a power generator that would give you light for any night time mission.

It began as a joke amongst the developers, having just finished SWAT 4, this game would be like a Swat 5, jokingly referred to as the Zombie Swat. Sadly, the company, going through some trouble at the time was unable to pitch the idea to the buyers in time, having only a week to prepare a demo. They did well, and were ready to sell it to Vivendi but they had just sold the company to Take-Two. Other concerns were the assumption that the zombie genre wouldn’t be as popular as it was in the target year.

If production had gone as planned it’s release would be around the same time as Bioshock. Thanks to Irrational games for this news (more info on the project can be found at Game Informer)

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A.I. The Circuit [XBOX – Cancelled]

A.I. The Circuit (aka A.I. Gladiator) is a cancelled fighting game that was in development by Radical Entertainment for the original Xbox. In May 2001 Microsoft signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Warner Bros to publish games based on Steven Spielberg’s movie “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”. Three A.I. games were planned but in the end they were all cancelled: A.I. The Circuit, A.I. Guardian and A.I. Chaser.

In december 2009, Borman from Superior Version found a playable prototype of A.I. The Circuit on an Alpha Xbox 1 Development Kit. This project was the last A.I. game  to be identified and thanks to Borman we are able to preserve many screens and videos from the proto! For more info and media, check Superior Version

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