New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Syndicate [PS2 – Cancelled]

The original Syndicate was a real-time tactical game from Bullfrog Productions created in 1993 by Sean Cooper and released for various platforms: PC, Amiga, SNES and Mega Drive / Genesis. A sequel was going to be developed for the Playstation 2, but it was later cancelled for unknow reasons. As we can read on Kotaku, it seems that it “was worked on for around a year. This would have featured a ‘free-roaming multi-tiered city’, and would have been home to three factions: the Syndicates, a rebel group called the Freemen and the mysterious Hybrid”. Only few concept arts remain from this project.

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Big Freakin Monsters [PS2 – Cancelled?]

A cancelled game that was in development by 3DO for the Playstation 2, but not many infos are available. From the few screens it seems that Big Freakin Monsters’s gameplay was going to be similar to the Rampage series, in which players take control of gigantic monsters trying to survive against onslaughts of military forces. Each round is completed when a particular city is completely reduced to rubble.

Thanks a lot to Hey Hey for the contribution!

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Earl the Frog [X360 – Cancelled]

Earl the Frog (later called “Max the Frog”) was an Xbox Live Arcade puzzle / action game that was in development in 2007 at Gamesmith. After a few months of thinking the team decided to go for a very easy and user-friendly gameplay.

The scenario came out of thinking about how to get into the female target-group. They thought about a princess.. and what does every princess need? A frog. And what does a frog need to do? Eeat of course. So they created the first concept for the game, in which a frog had to tidy up the place from flies to being able to survive until his princess finds him one day.

Around 1500 working hours of discussion, design & programming went into the project before its cancellation, as Microsoft was not interested to release it on XBLA. If you have access to an XNA Creators club membership, you can donwload a demo of Max The Frog from here, to play Max The Frog on your XBOX 360!

Thanks to Marc Bosch for the contribution!

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Time Splitters 4 [Cancelled – Xbox 360 / PS3]

Time Splitters 4 was the fourth installment of the FPS series developed by Free Radical Design. Sadly Free Radical “shut down” on December 18 2008. It was later confirmed that the company had gone into administration, leaving 40 of the original 185 staff still employed, but the future of Time Splitters 4 has become uncertain and maybe it will never be finished and released. The studio was bought by Crytek, the developers behind the Crysis series and Free Radical have changed their name to Crytek UK. It’s currently unknow if TS4 could ever be finished and released by Crytek. [Infos from Wikipedia]

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Animal Crossing [GC – Debug Rooms & Beta Stuff]

logo-animalcrossgc

As ace.dark has made us to notice, in the Youtube Channel of BowserEnemy there is an interesting series of videos from various debug rooms that were found in the GameCube version of Animal Crossing! In these beta worlds there are even some unused and weird objects, like flying boxes, baskets on a pole and beta villagers!

Thanks a lot to ace.dark for the contribution and props to BowserEnemy for the find!

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