Five Very Interesting Cancelled Games You Never Knew

Financial problems. Technical difficulties. Internal issues within the studio. These are some of the reasons why now and then, we find some games scrapped off of development and cancelled, no matter how promising they look. Whether they would have been great or not, we will never know. But the fact that they are cancelled makes them seem very interesting. So, here are some of those cancelled games that you may never knew. With that in mind, you shouldn't expect me to talk about cancelled games like STALKER 2, Command & Conquer: Tiberium or Fallout Online, as they are very well known and you've probably read about them somewhere else anyway.

Fallout Van Buren

Fallout Online isn't the only Fallout game that has been cancelled. Old-school Fallout fans would recognize cancelled Fallout project codenamed Van Buren. I talked a bit about this game in my rant on Fallout flamewar last year. Anyway, this project was announced back in the days when the Fallout series was still quite unknown as it is today. Black Isle Studios, the original creator of the Fallout series, intended to release it as the sequel to Fallout 2, so its final title would be Fallout 3 if it was to be released.

Back then, its development seemed to be just fine, several screenshots were released to the press. In fact, there was an early (if not more) gameplay footage as well. However, Black Isle Studios began to face some difficulties along the way, most probably financial difficulties. Bethesda, the studio famous for its Elder Scrolls series, saw the potential in the game and quickly bought the entire franchise from Black Isle Studios.

Now with the Fallout franchise entirely theirs, Bethesda was free to do what they wanted to it. Since the hardcore RPG concept of the old Fallout games won't appeal to newer generation of gamers, the entire design of Van Buren was scrapped. The result was the largely popular FPS-RPG hybrid Fallout 3. Fans of the original Fallout series, of course, felt betrayed by the new game which kept nothing from Van Buren except for the retro post-apocalyptic theme, which is the heart of the Fallout series. Nevertheless, Black Isle Studios was an example of many highly-potential development studios that had to shut down due to financial restraints.

It's also interesting to note that there is another cancelled Fallout game, but I'll let you figure that out yourself if you have no idea what it is.

Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End

I've always had a thing for classic horror stories, especially those by Edgar Allen Poe. When I was younger, for some reason I managed to find some time to sit down and read a good horror book. But it wasn't until I was 17 years old that I discovered Lovecraft's works and fell in love with them as well. His stories on Cthulhu, in particular.

Soon I turned my attention to video games and found myself playing Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and absolutely enjoyed my experience. To my surprise, Dark Corners of the Earth was supposed to be the first part of a series, in which Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End and Beyond the Mountains of Madness were planned to be the follow-ups.

Unfortunately for those anticipating the sequels, the first game took too long a time to complete; almost half a decade! When they started working on the sequels, the developers found themselves without any publisher. Eventually they had no choice but to cancel both the projects. As if that was not bad enough, later on, they disbanded due to bankruptcy.

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Heck, most people never even heard of Beyond Good & Evil, let alone its planned sequel which has never been released (or is said to be still in development by the publisher). Even the title doesn't make any sense. But with the silly, nonsensical title aside, it's actually a great action-adventure game and well-received by critics.

Basically, the game revolves around a huge, shadowy conspiracy taking place in the fictional planet of Hillys. Jade, the game's protagonist, is an investigative journalist who seeks to uncover the truth. Also, she knows martial arts! And thankfully, she's also one of the few female leads in video games whose sexual appearance aren't unrealistically portrayed. The game was known for its meaningful story, fluid animation, puzzle-solving elements and stealth-based mechanics. As Jade, you have to traverse the game's environments with stealth and solve puzzles along the way, as well as defeating enemies with melee combat. Besides that, you also need to take photographs of evidence with your trustworthy camera, which was unique to the game.

Now, one of the main things you should know about Beyond Good & Evil is that it was planned to be a trilogy, just like Call of Cthulhu that we talked about previously. The next sequel in line was Beyond Good & Evil 2. Unfortunately, the sales of the first game were not at par with its reception. Ubisoft, the publisher that four years later would be known for milking the heck out of its main cash cow, Assassin's Creed, did not see eye-to-eye with the development team.

But then again, Beyond Good & Evil was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier, which is kind of a branch of Ubisoft itself, so I guess the publisher had the rights to decide what they please anyway. Regardless, a full HD re-mastered version of the game was released in 2011. Now that I think about it, if only the game had a more relevant title, it probably would have enjoyed better commercial success, and we would also probably be playing the sequels right now.

Urban Decay

A captioned screenshot of the game from the Next Generation magazine (issue: September 1995)

Now this is a cancelled game that I'm absolutely sure you never knew. Urban Decay was developed by Andrew Spencer Studios. It was supposed to be the spiritual successor of the game Ecstatica. Urban Decay was planned to be a third-person shooter taking place in an urban setting. It revolved around a man on the run as he is being chased by cops and gangs. It would have also featured stealth-action gameplay and emphasized on taking cover during gunfights. From the sound of it, the game seemed to be ahead of its time.

The key feature of Urban Decay is the use of ellipsoid 3D graphics, which was also implemented in its Ecstatica. Hey what the hell is ellipsoid, you ask? The fancy definition for it, which I totally didn't learn from Wikipedia, is "a closed quadric surface that is a three-dimensional analogue of an ellipse". In other words, everything in the game looked either spherical or "3D-ellipsical". The next time you want to use that term, don't forget to mention that it was coined by yours truly.

There, that's ellipsoid. Kind of.

Anyway, on a serious note, this unique visual-style most probably arose due to the technical limitation at that period of time, in which 3D graphics were still new (I guess? Wow I'm really bad at this). However, Urban Decay was put on hold because the development studio wanted to focus on the sequel of Ecstatica. After the release of Ecstatica II, the development on Urban Decay continued. It retained the ellipsoid-style but with the addition of facial expressions and lip-synching which were absent from its spiritual predecessor.

But then, the developer faced a new dilemma: after the release of Ecstatica II in 1997, ellipsoid graphics could be considered outdated as the newer and better vector-based graphics became available. Besides that, some employees walked out of the door to work with Disney instead. With the lost of several critical employees, the development for Urban Decay became more constrained. Worse of all, the studio's relationship with the publisher Psygnosis also deteriorated. In the end, the publisher cancelled its deal with Andrew Spencer Studios and left on bad terms. With no publisher funding the development, the studio had to abandon Urban Decay. Ultimately, the studio disbanded as well.

You can say that the project eventually decayed.

Agartha

Agartha is an cancelled game originally planned to be released for the SEGA Dreamcast, but I'm going to talk about it anyway because I like its story and plot. As a matter of fact, its development was funded by SEGA (which later on, led to the project's demise). Agartha was first mentioned in 1998 and was expected to be released late the very next year, along with Gutherman, another game by the same developer.

But then 2000 came in and apparently the game was still in development. With Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark as some of its influences, Agartha's first official exposure was during the Electronic Computer Trade Show 2000 and its initial 1999's release date was moved to 2001. The game incorporated elements of moral choices and different endings, which are popular nowadays in games such as Mass Effect and basically any RPG. It was revealed that Agartha also featured multiplayer modes. Several screenshots were released as well as the plot synopsis:

During the winter of 1929 in a Romanian village that was partially destroyed by a landslide that occurred during a mysterious earthquake, a subterranean city exists called Agartha. This is where evil is being kept prisoner and is desperate to escape. Kirk the human hero will encounter a series of characters from villages, the living dead, fanatics from an evil sect, monsters, demons, solider monks, priests, archangels and the Sentinel who is the ultimate personification of evil. As Kirk you can decide to save as many innocent people as possible or to trigger the arrival of chaos on earth. As Kirk's morals waver between good and evil, this ambiguity changes the aims of the adventure and the narration of the story.

However, the console competition was tight in the early 2000's. Eventually, SEGA couldn't catch up with the whole console business and in early 2001, announced that they had discontinued the production of the Dreamcast consoles. Games that were already in development were not called off however, as long as they could be completed on time. Unfortunately, Agartha couldn't keep up and had to be cancelled. The development studio also had the same fate as their project; No Cliche disbanded and the development team went on separate ways.

On a more interesting note however, while searching for information on Agartha, I stumbled upon this great site, Unseen64, which collected and published information of unreleased games. On the comment section, one of the development staff (under the pseudonym NC) shared their experience and story during the development of Agartha and I think no source is better than the words of someone who actually worked on the game. According to NC, "I spent another ten years in video games after that, and I never met people so engaged into their project after this". Since Agartha had no trailer, we have nothing but a 15-minute video of the early in-game footage, making it our closest glimpse on the game.

Note: Thanks to the guys at Unseen64 for allowing me to use the images on their site for the sections on Urban Decay and Agartha. While most of the images and screenshots on this site are my own, it's obvious that I had to obtain images for these unreleased games from other sources. Check out their site to discover unreleased gems that you may never knew!

By the way, what are cancelled games that you wish had been released?