New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Unseen News

Exerion 2 (II) [NES – Unreleased in USA]

monokoma
12-07-2009
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The original Exerion was a vertical shoot ’em up released by Jaleco in 1983 and licensed to Taito for distribution on the United States. The game featured parallax effects and inertia simulation, something notable for 1983. [Info from Wikipedia] Sometime later, Jaleco worked on a “sequel” of the game, but as we can read on the Lost Levels forum, it was just the first Exerion with “updated graphics and music”. Anyway, in the end Exerion 2 was never released in America but a prototype was found and leaked online by the Nintendo Age community in June 2009. For all the NES collectors out there, a reproduction cart with Exerion 1+2 can also be bought and played on a real NES thanks to RetroZone!

Images:

Exerion 1+2 exerionenemies2

Videos:

GameCube, Nintendo, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Backstage [PS2/GC/PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
12-07-2009
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Backstage is a cancelled arcade racing game somehow similar to Crazy Taxy, that was in development in 2003 by Carapace and it would have been published by Wanadoo. The player would have start the game as a young and surf wear clothed bike messenger (with a scooter) named Zack. The action took place in a Los Angeles like city (its Studios, different districts and suburbs).

Zack is a kind of jack-of-all-trades, he had to accomplish such different jobs as deliveries, taxi, collections, races, track-races, and shooting (with a camera). Doing this, Zack would have meet important people of this universe who could have give him access to filming: his secret dream.

For unknwon reasons the project was never released and a couple of years later Carapace closed down.

Thanks a lot to Kyle for the contribution!

Images:

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Xbox

Survivor [XBOX / PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
11-07-2009
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Survivor was a “Disaster Survival” game that was in development at Replay Studios in 2004 for the original XBOX and PC. The player would have had to survive through “historical” disasters from the 20 – 21 th century, like the Titanic, Hurricane Andrew or the 9/11. The project was later cancelled, maybe because of the controversial scenarios.

Images:

Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Eden [PS2 – Concept]

monokoma
10-07-2009
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Through GameSetLinks, Robert Seddon linked us to the International Hobo website, where they talk about one of their unreleased project for the Playstation 2, known as “Eden”. Eden was going to be a simulation / puzzle game in which the player would have been able to explore and grow his personal garden, but for various reasons Eden was shelved before they even started the  development. Only the concept design remains and you can read it all on ihobo:

When circumstances in the market changed and Play with Fire ceased to be a PS2 project (with a commensurate fall in budget), Eden was effectively shelved. Plans were tentatively made to resurrect it later, and inventive Belgian developer Tale of Tales were considered as an option for developer.

However, over the following years the project was to suffer further blows. The Japanese gardening game Shiki-Tei (“Four Seasons Garden”) was released in June 2008 for download on the PS3 and featured time-lapse as part of its gimmick – it was apparent that the technology for this is still very expensive, and the quality of the time lapse in Shiki-Tei was nowhere near the standard we had hoped to use in Eden, suggesting we could not have delivered this part of the design pragmatically. Then, the following month, Dylan Cuthbert’s Q-Games released Pixeljunk Eden for download on PS3, which meant the name “Eden” would have to be shelved.

Finally, in February 2009, Jenova Chen’s thatgamecompany released their game Flower for download on the PS3 which had so many fundamental similarities to Eden that this project was officially shelved. Flower is a magnificent piece of work, and more beautiful than Eden could ever have been on the budget we were intending to use for it. Although the play of the two games is very different, it’s apparent given the issues with time lapse technology that Eden was too ambitious for its time.