third person shooter

32X / Mega CD, Mega Drive / Genesis, Sega

Hardcore [Mega Drive / Genesis & Mega CD – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors
15-07-2008
16 Comments

This little-known game appears as a ‘work-in-progress’ in the September 1994 issue of Sega Power, it was developed by DICE (originally for the Amiga) but it doesn’t have a decent description. According to the article, Hardcore was a typical run-and-gun platformer, similar to the Turrican series or Super Star Wars, with many different enemies to destroy. The press release for the game boasted that ‘you are able to shoot almost everything, even if it’s not necessary’. There was also a Mega-CD version to be released, which was to include a driving segment at the end of each level, similar to Batman Returns. Although planned for a November 1994 release, both versions of the game were seemingly cancelled.

Little else is said about the game in the article, which is a common trend for previews in Sega Power… They seem to have spent far more time writing the amusing captions, which you can see in the article scan.

It seems that the original Amiga version of Hardcore only got half-finished. Then they decided to do it on Megadrive instead; the MD cartridge version was 99% finished (just a bug or two in the game logic, and highscores aren’t saved) when Psygnosis decided not to publish it. The MD-CD version did not get very far in development.

Thanks a lot to Repi for the contribution! Thanks to DarkFalzX for the video!

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Thanks to Grzegorz here are some screenshots from when Hardcore was developed for Amiga by Digital Illusion:

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

MDK [PC/PSX – Concept]

U64 Staff & Contributors
14-07-2008
1 Comment

mdk-psx-concept

MDK is a third-person shooter game developed by Shiny Entertainment and released in 1997 by Playmates Interactive Entertainment for the PC, Macintosh, and subsequently PlayStation. MDK’s gameplay is usually a third person shooter, except when sniper mode is entered. As expected, Kurt has a wide range of weapons to choose from, which differ in standard gameplay and sniper mode. [Info from Wikipedia]

Thanks to this old promo video that Chentzilla has uploaded on his Youtube channel, we can see a concept version of MDK, with some differences from the final version:

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Dreadnought (HMS Carnage) [PC PSX Saturn – Cancelled]

monokoma
09-07-2008
4 Comments

HMS Carnage (later renamed to Dreadnought / Dreadnoughts and internally know as Dread0) is a cancelled Victorian steam-punk shooter (with strategy elements) set on the red planet of Mars, that was in development for almost 3 years by the Tribe team at Ocean Software. It was an ambitious project, but only a small playable demo and detailed FMV were finished before Infogrames acquired Ocean in 1998 and decided to kill it some months later.

It seems that the game concept was somehow similar to Warhawk, released in 2007 for the Playstation 3, in which the player is able to use ground and air vehicles, turrets and on-foot weapons to kill their enemies and complete the mission objectives.

HMS Carnage was mainly a PC-CDROM game and the PSX / Saturn ports were an afterthought: the console versions would have been very different  with more action and less strategy.

At the time Ocean had a reputation for producing low quality movie tie-ins but with the much-hyped arrival of CDROM as a gaming format they wanted to develop some really ground breaking games. Ocean rebranded their internal development department as “Tribe”, invested a lot of money, hired a lot of new talent and asked everyone to come up with amazing original concepts huge enough to fill a CDROM.

HMS Carnage was one of the winning concepts, Silver was another (released 4 years later) and the third was a point ‘n click adventure with Hanna-Barbera characters, called “Zoiks” which was also cancelled.

The game kept its “HMS Carnage” title throughout most of the development, while “Dreadnought” was a name thought up by the marketing department towards the end (the development team didn’t much like it). Probably they though it was a more sellable title for a shooter.

Sadly the name-change was not enough to save the game. When Infogrames bought Ocean and review Dreadnought, too much work and money were still needed to complete the project: they thought that it could have been an economic failure and decided to cancel the development. After the cancellation, part of  the Tribe team went to work at Psygnosis.

A preview for HMS Carnage was published in Edge magazine issue 32 (1996), if you are able to scan those pages, please let us know!

Thanks a lot to Maria Ingold, Matt Wood, Julian Holtom for their help in preserving media and info from their lost project!

Thanks to Robert Seddon and Celine for the magazines scans!

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Leaked, Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Tommy Thunder [N64 – Prototype / Cancelled]

monokoma
28-06-2008
4 Comments

tommy-thundern64-proto

Tommy Thunder was a third person shooter in development for the Nintendo 64 (and later for the PSX too) from Player 1 studios, but it was never released and we never got many informations about it. In November 2007, herpetic.adventures on the LostLevels forum posted an interesting story about a misterious file: “[…] about 10 years ago I was poking around the Player1 website looking for info on when Robotron 64 was coming out. Just for the hell of it, I clicked the “Press Info” link. Which turned out to be an anonymous FTP. Woo. Poked around a bit, and amongst directories of PSX assets, I found robo64.zip and tommy64.zip.” Inside the zipped file, there was what it looks like an early prototype of Tommy Thunder 64 and so, thanks to herpetic.adventures, we finally have some screens from the game to look at! You can read more  info about his find in the Lost Levels Forum and check this article on NES World, where you can read some quotes from Tommy Thunder’s developers:

What you have is an early N64 Prototype of Tommy Thunder. The game got signed by ASC games and switched to PlayStation. We made it pretty far into production before ASC Games ran out of money and were forced to cancel the project.

Thanks to Vaettur for the logo!

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