New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

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)

Images:

Video:

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

Images:

Videos:

Heroes of Might and Magic 3: The Forge [PC – Beta]

So there is this game, you might’ve heard about it: Heroes of Might and Magic 3. You might have heard of it’s expansion Armaggedon’s Blade. You might also have heard of Conflux, one of the “towns” (town = faction) that was added with the expansion.

Oh yeah, you might say, what’s so special about that town?

Well, here’s the deal: The Conflux was not supposed to be there in the beginning. There was no Conflux. Only Zuul- I mean Forge.

Omgzorz, what is Forge? Why was it removed? Well, Forge was a town that was supposed to be in the expansion but got removed due to poor fan reactions. The Forge was to be a town with a sci-fiction theme (like zombies with razorsaws as hands or humans with flamethrowers).

Read more

Painkiller: Hell Wars [PSP – Cancelled]

Painkiller: Hell Wars is a cancelled FPS that was in development in 2006 by czech studio Mindware Studios (which also developed Painkiller: Overdose and a spiritual successor, Dreamkiller), that would have been published by DreamCatcher Interactive for the PSP. The original Painkiller was released in 2004 for PC and in 2006 a port titled “Hell Wars” was published for the Xbox, but the PSP one would have been different from the other versions. As we can read in a Gamespot preview from E3 2006:

The game’s content appears to be mostly new, with new monsters, weapons, and levels, as opposed to Hell Wars for the Xbox, which was mostly a port of existing PC content.

Sadly Painkiller Hell Wars was never released for the PSP: only few images  and a trailer are available, but the ingame scenes dont seem to be from the PSP version. It’s currently unknown how much of the game was completed before its cancellation.

Thanks to Userdante and Jaxx for the contributions!

Images:

Videos:

Metal Gear Solid [Game.com – Cancelled]

Before being cancelled, a version of Metal Gear Solid was in development for the ill-fated Game.com, a portable console released by Tiger Electronics in 1997. It seems that the game was going to be a port of Metal Gear Solid PSX, but there are just few info on the project. At one point, a gameplay video of this game was distributed among group members of the now-defunct America Online account “TigerGcom”, but sadly this footage seems to have been lost forever.

After many researches, Celine was able to find a screenshot of Metal Gear Solid Game.com in Console Plus magazine issue #90! On the 22 January 2010, Parasyte posted some more screens in the Lost Levels Forum.

Images: