first person shooter

Mindhack (Mindware Studios) [PC – Cancelled]

Mindhack is a cancelled Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter developed by Mindware Studios around 2001-2002, exclusively for PC.

No information about Mindhack’s background are available at the moment. By looking at the few artworks and screenshots of the game, we can tell that it was set in a futuristic science fiction universe. The game was revealed in March 2002 with a short explanation of its concept on a dedicated website:

“Mindhack is an Online Action Game which combines popular and proven elements of first person action games with the principles of mass online games (massive socializing support, persistent character, etc.). The system of game rules is relatively straight forward while providing a great number of game types and many different ways players can enjoy the game.

Mindhack is not intended solely for hardcore players but also for mass-market players preferring the action genre. Players will be attracted by familiar action principles combined with many socializing elements which will allow them to interact with other players in ways not seen today in games of this type.”

Using a proprietary engine called MENG, it seems the game was showed at the Game Developers Conference 2002 in order to sign with a publisher, apparently without success, before falling into obscurity for a few years.

In 2006, following the future release of Mac and Linux versions of their first game, Cold War, Phoronix was able to interview programmer Patrik Rak. Mindhack was briefly mentionned about its cancellation:

“(…) The goal at that time was to develop a FPS based MMO game, but several month later we have concluded that the MMO market became so crowded that all but the best backed up of these project are necessarily going to bite the dust. So we quickly steered to more conventional waters of the third-person single player world, before any serious harm was done.”

According to former CEO Karel Papik, the technology primarly developed for Mindhack would later served as a basis for Cold War.

Mindhack wasn’t the only cancelled game from Mindware Studios. In 2006, the company had to axe Voodoo Nights and Unknown Heroes, both due to a lack of publishers interested in the projects.

If you know someone who worked on Mindhack and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

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The Triangle (Digital Spray Studios) [PC – Cancelled]

The Triangle is a cancelled First-Person Shooter developed around 2003-2004 by Digital Spray Studios, only for the PC.

As we can read on the now-defunct website of it’s developer, The Triangle was:

“A First Person Shooter, in a classical “kill ’em all” style. Game actions take place at the mysterious islands in the Atlantic Ocean, in the region of the, so called, Bermuda Triangle. The main hero is the explorer of mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. He finds temples, palaces and the lost cities of an unknown antique civilization and tries to solve the secret of it’s downfall. When he starts the exploration of those ancient buildings, our hero finds out that they are not desolated, but populated by some kind of fantastic alien creatures, which are not “very friendly” to him. Now he has to try hard to remain alive.”

The game was revealed at the Game Developers Conference 2003, along with You Are Empty, using the same proprietary engine, the DS2 Engine. Some media drawn a comparison with the game Serious Sam.

Little information is available on The Triangle to date. Unlike You Are Empty, which had found a publisher, The Triangle quickly disappeared from radar screens when it was announced and never resurfaced. Only a few screenshots are currently available to remember its existence. We can assume that the developers did not manage to find a potential publisher and decided to postpone the development of the game to devote themselves to You Are Empty, which was released in Eastern Europe in 2006 and in North America in 2007, thanks to Atari, after a chaotic development.

If you know someone who worked on The Triangle and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

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Dementium 2 [Tech Demo – DS]

Dementium 2 is a FPS developed by Renegade Kid and released for DS in 2010. Below we can see some screenshots and a video of a tech demo that was created before the actual development of the game started. Gregg Hargrove briefly talked about it in the Renegade Kid board:

I wanted to comment on how amazed I am that anyone was even able to find any info on the original “Village” demo that became D2. Wow!

I also wanted to give a shout out to the artist that helped me develop that demo, Erik McKenney, who sadly was not able to stay on with us past the demo. Times were crazy and we didn’t know where what was going to happen so we lost a great artist to a more stable company. D2 would have been that much better if we could have kept him on.

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