New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Warcraft 2: development weirdness

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“After the first Warcraft and when we were talking about Warcraft II, there was an idea for about a week where we’d open another portal open and have the Orcs invade the modern-day world. We had this whole cut-scene we were talking about where it was going to be dragons and F-16s and firefights and stuff. And we were like, “Man, that’s going to be weird. That’s going to suck. That’s not going to be Warcraft.” – Bill Roper, Games for Windows, Jan, 2007.

Imagine how that would have been. It sounds a bit like Warhammer 40,000, doesn’t it?

The development of Grand Theft Auto 3D

Some time ago, IGN made an interesting article about the history of Grand Theft Auto and in one of the chapters, there are some informations about the development of the first 3D version of the game: “Bringing GTA into the present tense hit its first roadblock when the DMA crew pulled Body Harvest’s 3D code off the shelf and found it’d aged badly. Building a whole new engine from scratch didn’t fit the schedule. Renting one did.”

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“Instead of licensing a proprietary game engine, they became one of the first developers to use generic third-party middleware. Renderware scaled fast. A basic Liberty City was up by summer 2000, and a nameless anti-hero – only referred to as “Claude” in a few obscure lines of code – could boost cars and drive around in it. New elements popped in every month. Weather changed. Day and night marked the time. Some jacked drivers fought back. Stealing the right car opened up bonus missions. Multiplayer got a carry-over from London 1961 and was dropped before the design strayed.”

[…]

“Aircraft-based missions, a GTA first, were curtailed. School kids and elderly pedestrians pushing walkers vanished off the sidewalks. Missions doled out by homeless anarchist Darkel got the chop; only his ice cream truck-bomb job survived, transferred to El Burro with the targets switched from cops to rival gangsters.”

You can read the full story in here. For more screens from the beta version of GTA3, check our archive: GTA 3 Beta / Tech Demo

Thanks to Alber Gallegos for this link!

Blizzard Cancelled Games

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At DICE 2008, Blizzard had some talk about their games and in there, they showed an interesting list with a couple of “new” artworks for some of their cancelled projects. As Kotaku has wrote about:

“The team also revealed a list of the Blizzard games that have been canceled over the course of their 17 years, a list longer than you may think. If you thought Blizzard was only focused on StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo, think again. While they may have a few lesser known titles like Blackthorne and The Lost Vikings on their resumes, they were at one point working on all of the following Read more

WarCraft Adventures [PC – Cancelled]

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WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was a dark comical point-and-click adventure computer game under development by Blizzard Entertainment that was set in the Warcraft universe, and cancelled before its release. American company Animation Magic was out-sourced due to their experience in classical two-dimensional animation to produce the twenty-two minutes of fully-animated sequences, the game’s artwork, the coding of the engine and the implementation of the sound effects. Blizzard then provided all the designs, the world backgrounds, sound recording and ensured storyline continuity. Four or five months after Blizzard had released Read more