UnHoly was a first person / horror action adventure that was in development in 2000 / 2001 for the original XBOX by OtherWorlds InterActive. It was originally announced in 1997 as a PC game and then it became one of the first XBOX exclusives, but they never found a publisher interested in the project.
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Daikatana is a First-Person Shooter developed by Ion Storm, led by John Romero and published by Eidos Interactive in 2000. In Daikatana, the player assumes the role of Hiro Miyamoto, a Japanese swordmaster in 2455 A.D. He had to travel through various time periods using the eponymous Daikatana, a powerful sword tied to the fate of the world.
Romero’s initial game design, completed in March 1997, called for a huge amount of content – 24 levels split into 4 distinct time periods, 26 weapons, and 64 monsters, as reported by the issue #30 of Next Generation, from June 1997:
NG: How will these four different time periods differ?
J.R.: They all have completely different graphics. There are none shared between the time periods except for some of the artifacts you pick up that are universal. There are 26 weapons — every time period has it’s entire complete set of weapons. Then there are completely new monsters for each episode and 16 monsters in each episode.
Despite this, Romero believed that development of the game could be completed in six months, just in time for Christmas 1997. The game was to license the id Tech 2, Quake‘s game engine. However, as we can read on PC Gamer, in early 1997, the Quake II engine was showcased for the first time, and Romero admitted that their own game wasn’t up to date graphically:
(…) Despite the ambitious scope, Romero estimated that by licensing the Quake engine, his team could have the project turned around in six months. But in early 1997, Romero and Hall saw Quake II in action. They were blown away by its engine, which included among its features coloured lighting and support for hardware acceleration. Their games were already behind schedule, but they figured it was worth the time investment to incorporate the Quake II source code in order to keep their games visually up to date.
At E3 of the same year, a first trailer was showed and wasn’t well received due to low framerate and being outdated.
Daikatana 1997 E3 trailer. Still using the id Tech 2.
Throughout the 1998 year, the project evolved only visually since the source code of the Quake II engine was not definitively implemented until March 1999, almost a year and a half of programming before reaching the final rendering.
The Daikatana team was left to fathom how to incorporate the code by itself. At this time, 3D graphics rendering technology was improving at an exponential rate, and the complexity was compounding with it. As a result, the code base for the Quake II engine was radically different. Ion Storm received the Quake II source code in November 1997, but it would take until March 1999 to fully implement it into Daikatana.
Differences between the 1998 version and the final one are the HUD, the sounds and the design of some weapons, items and the main menu.
Daikatana 1998 trailer
In the gallery below you can see a series of screenshots and videos from the early build on the original Quake 1 engine (with removed and changed levels), alongside the slightly different 1998 version. In 2004 Romero released this playable pre-alpha version of Daikatana, and you should be able to download it from here.
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1997 version very early build
Another trailer from the 1997 version
1997 version’s demonstration of various areas
A playlist of no less than 25 videos of the 1997 version
1998 Version’s gameplay
The development of Doom began in 1992 as a tie-in of Aliens, but the first concept of the game, “Evil Unleashed“, was finished only in febraury 1993. As we can see from the ToastyTech website, this demo had only a room and three enemies: an imp, a demon, and a baron of hell. The hud was very different and with more status informations, even if still not functional. They were still testing the engine , so it was possible to change the textures and the lighting system using the keyboard.
The next build of Doom that we have, the alpha 4-22 (dated april 1993), included, instead, early versions of many levels (Spawning Vats, Containment Area,Refinery, Computer Station, Central Processing, Command Control, Nuclear Plant, Pandemonium) and a test map that was discarded. Some areas (like a room where marines are playing cards, that was supposed to be the beginning of the game, or the showers and the lockers) and objects (like the office chairs) of the stages were completely removed, in part probably because the story of the game was at the beginning much more complex and there were five playable characters (Lorelei Chen, John Pietrovich, Dimitri Paramo, Thi Barrett,Buddy Dacote). Items couldn’t be collected, and their design was still unfinished. The chainsaw was already there, though. Also, there were some removed pickups, like a strange circle of skulls, and you could use a bayonet for melee attacks. Enemies didn’t have any AI and they still couldn’t be killed, but the developers had already created the graphics for a first version of the Lost Souls, even if they weren’t accessible in the game yet.
A subsequent alpha, the 5-22 (dated may 1993), showed a game much more similar to the Doom we know. Familiar elements like toxic pools, keycards, explosive barrels, medikits, the overworld map, were added, enemies could now be killed (but they just disappeared), items could be picked up, switches and elevators worked, the Cacodemon and the Zombieman were created but still not inserted in the game. A press release beta demo made shortly before the final version had still a few strange items and some differences in the layouts of the three levels included. Interestingly, the game still keep the score like in the alpha 5-22, even if it wasn’t in the hud anymore.
Some more info can be found in this article:
the design document sketches an outline of a game that’s closer to Left 4 Dead than the actual Doom – a co-op romp through a realistic military base filled with undead and devoid of lava traps or acid pits. There was even a proper story too; one set to span six episodes
A cut area called The Officer’s Club, for example, is described in the design document as a private bar where players could find “a neat collector’s pistol (if we can have weapon quality)”. There was no other purpose for the area – the Club was an optional stopping off point for those who wanted to explore and who’d collected a dismembered hand that could fool the biometric locks.
Doom had been intended to start in the hangar where the heroes played cards, a short cut-scene ending with players standing around the card table and even holding in their inventory the sandwiches they had been eating.
Some of the pre-release alpha and beta versions are available in the idgames archive. You can find them on Doomworld, or do a search for “/idgames/historic/”.
Thanks a lot to Nathan for the contribution, to Deepcut and Joe Martin for the links and to SquarePulse for some of the videos!
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Navy Force (also know as Navy Seals) was a Squad-Based Tactical Shooter that was in development for the Playstation 2 by Jaleco in 2000. The game was officially cancelled in 2001 because they though that it could have been an economic failure. Only a target render trailer (shown at Tokyo Game Show 2000) remains from the project.
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The original Turok: Evolution is a FPS developed and published by Acclaim Entertainment for the GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2002. After Evolution, a small Acclaim team was trying to work on a direct sequel, but the project never got off the ground so they soon moved on to other projects. Only few artworks remain from this Turok Evolution sequel that never was. When Acclaim was closed, Turok vanished from the gaming scene untill when Disney Interactive Studios purchased the rights to the Turok franchise. Propaganda Games developed the next Turok, that was released for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 in 2008.
Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!
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