New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Unseen News

It’s summer time: see you in september!

U64 Staff & Contributors
08-08-2009
No Comments

u64vacationbeach.jpg

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! From today (8th of August) this site will be in “Summer Break Mode 2009”, 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 woods. Don’t worry! We’ll be back in September with all the updates and news from the unseen gaming world. In the meantime, there are still lots of things to do 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!

– 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!

– Play: Are you going to buy some new games  for this summer or in the next few months? If you buy them from Play.com, from Zavvi, from The Hut, from Sendit or from Playasia using our links and banners, they give us some spare money! For you it’s free, for us it helps paying for the U64 server. Thank you guys :)

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

– The Unseen 64 Staff –

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

Faith and a .45 [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3]

monokoma
08-08-2009
5 Comments

Faith and a .45 is a cancelled action game that was in development by Deadline Games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The story would have follow a couple named Luke and Ruby, two outlaws during the Great Depression. This idea evolved from a tech demo about a “Bonnie & Clyde” couple, inspired from the real-life couple of outlaws, robbers and criminals who, with their gang, travelled the Central United States during the 1930s.

The game was going to follow their lovely escape (Deadline called Faith and a .45 a “gritty, emotional shooter”) and the gameplay should have been similar to a cover-based third-person shooter (as Gears of War or Army of Two) in particular with the dual-character dynamic, with online and offline co-op. [Info from Wikipedia]

Sadly they were not able to find a publisher interested in the project and on May 2009, Deadline Games filed for bankruptcy. Faith and a .45 vanished forever with the closure of the studio.

As noted by NeXuSDK on the NeoGAF forum, Deadline Games had a lot of troubles selling the game concept to publishers:

Initially, Faith and a .45 was set in a post-apocalyptic setting ala Fallout, which publishers didn’t see value… now look at Fallout. Then they changed the theme to something Bonnie & Clyde inspired, set in the era of the great depression and still developers could not see the potential.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

Thanks a lot to Jonas Springborg, Jan Ditlev and Adam Rishede for the help in preserving their artworks created for this project! Some more images are from  Carsten Brandt’s website. All images are copyrighted Deadline Games.

Images:

Videos:

Søren Lundgaard is the Game Consultant at DADIU. Before this he worked at Deadline Games for 10 years, first as a Lead Programmer, later as a Game Director.

Credits:

Original Idea
Kristine Ploug
Søren Lundgaard

Director
Helle Pagter

Visual Concept Helle Pagter
Felicia Bang

Production Design
Felicia Bang
Tine Lylloff Madsen

Multiple Camera Direction
Sun Hee Engelstoft

Camera
Signe Tora Munk Bencke
Sine Vadstrup Brooker
Martin Køhler Jørgensen

Light
Torben Borup-Madsen

Edit
Linda Nielsen-Mann
Helle Pagter

Sound
Sune Kaarsberg

Set Construction
Ninna Stengade

Technical Support
Schack Lindemann
Peter Posgaard
Lars Holstener

Logo animation
Dennis Nielsen

Images
All images courtesy of Aptocore Aps

Thank you
The National Film School of Denmark
The Computer Game Zone

Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Dodge Ball: World Chaos [PS2 – Cancelled]

monokoma
07-08-2009
No Comments

Dodge Ball: World Chaos is a arcade sport game with adventure elements (somehow similar to Sega Soccer Slam and Mario Strikers Charged) that was in development by IRD1 in 2001 / 2002, for the Playstation 2.  We would have been able to go around the city to talk with other characters between matches to learn more about the story and upgrade our team. A multiplayer option with 8 players support was planned for coop and VS mode. Sadly it seems that they were not able to find a publisher interested in the project and the game was then cancelled.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

Images:

32X / Mega CD, M2 / 3DO, Mega Drive / Genesis, Others, Sega

Dyno Blaze [G/MD/3DO – Cancelled]

monokoma
06-08-2009
13 Comments

Dyno Blaze is a cancelled beat ’em up that was in development by Bonsai Entertainment for the Genesis / Mega Drive, Mega CD and 3DO in 1994 and it would have been published by Virgin. A playable prototype of the game was somehow leaked online in 2008, in which you can try a series of (almost empty) levels where to move your rollerblade-dinosaur to fight enemies with an hockey stick. The levels are incomplete and bugged but it’s possible to go trought them waiting for a bit at the end of the area and pressing the jump button.

The original press release for the game:

Today, Virgin Interactive Entertainment and Bonsai Entertainment Corporation signed a multi-SKU development contract for DYNOBLAZE®, an original game for SEGA CD and SEGA GENESIS.

Bonsai Entertainment will develop the original game based upon designs previously developed. “It’s a game about ‘Teenage Mutant Ninga Dinosaurs’, that play street hockey on the streets of New York”, said Joseph Moses, President of Bonsai Entertainment. He added, “Teaming up with Virgin, already a key player in this industry, is a major step for Bonsai. We intend to make them very proud.”

“DynoBlaze” is scheduled for Christmas 1995 release across multiple platforms.

A weird Dyno Blaze proto was seen at the Video Game History 2008 expo in Monza (Italy), organized by our friends at Games Collection. In the VGH2K8 proto you can just see a rolling demo of the game’s menu (without any gameplay) and a strange graph for a medicine know as “Lotensin” by CibaGeneva pharmaceuticals. We dont have any clue about what this all means, so if you have a good explanation feel free to share it!

The 3DO version was in development by Alexandria Inc but sadly after some months of work the lead background artist died from an illness and the game was soon canceled not long after. The 3DO port had better graphic (as you can see from the scans below, found by Celine in Game Fan #95 and Cd Consoles magazines) and animations, almost like a cartoon.

Thanks to Jean-François Thébé and Scott Rogers for the contributions!

Images:

Video:

Unseen News

RS Links: Miyamoto talks about the removed Mario 64 coop

monokoma
06-08-2009
No Comments

miyamoto3

Robert Seddon has linked us to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that was published on Wired. In one of his answers, Miyamoto talks about the removed coop mode that was supposed to be included in Mario 64:

Wired.com: You said you had the idea to do a four-player Mario game for a long time. Had you ever actually done any prototypes of such a game on other hardware?

Miyamoto: With each (Mario) project, we do different experiments. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We’ve done games in the past where we’ve had the idea and worked on it. But with side-scrolling games, the challenge was that the screen continues to scroll forward, and what happens when the other player falls off the screen? With Mario 64, we had an experiment that took advantage of the idea of the screen growing larger and smaller depending on how far apart the characters were. So we had Mario and Luigi running around in that 3-D world, but we ended up not using it. […]

Wired.com: Why did you decide not to use that Nintendo 64 game with Mario and Luigi?

Miyamoto: Ultimately, it’s the idea of processing speed and working within the constraints of the hardware. The DS Mario 64 had a mode with something similar to that, where you were playing with four characters.

I wonder if he really meant the original “Mario 64” when he was talking about Mario & Luigi in the prototype, as he could have got confused with “Mario 64 II”. Infact, his phrase is similar to an old comment about M64II (as we can read on Super Mario 128 Central):

Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We’ve been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system. – Shigeru Miyamoto on Mario 64 II, November 1998

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!