Cancelled Games You Wish Had Been Released - I Can't Think of a Good Subtitle

[Bastard_Call]

Any number of Arkane's cancelled projects. Literally all of them read like some bullshit rumour you'd hear about on the grapevine. "DUDE, I heard they're making a video game where it's singleplayer but sometimes you run into squads of other players in a 20 player TDM and have to navigate the crossfire." Only they were actually doing it.

Resident Evil 2's original build. Ultimately I think the RE2 we ended up with was better in every respect, but the fact that there's a 90% complete official PSX RE game out there that we'll never see finished is maddening to me.

 

[TFT-A9]

Starcraft: Ghost.

It looked like it might have had some potential.

 

[Kurt Eichenwald]

My ass still hurts about Timesplitters 4 being cancelled. It could've been the 1st online game of the series and with the map maker, the highly customizable arcade mode, and Robofish, it might have been amazing.
Also idk if they ever tried to make a Turok 4, but the 3rd one ended on a bit of a cliffhanger and it still keeps me up at night 20 years later wondering where the plot was going.

 

[Lee Crabb]

Operation Flashpoint 2 was originally going to be a "Cold War goes hot" game (my favorite game setting) set during the 1970s; open world combined arms combat in sub Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, and central Europe. I can't find any footage or screens of it, but I remember being blown away at the graphics at the time.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Any number of Arkane's cancelled projects. Literally all of them read like some bullshit rumour you'd hear about on the grapevine. "DUDE, I heard they're making a video game where it's singleplayer but sometimes you run into squads of other players in a 20 player TDM and have to navigate the crossfire." Only they were actually doing it.

Resident Evil 2's original build. Ultimately I think the RE2 we ended up with was better in every respect, but the fact that there's a 90% complete official PSX RE game out there that we'll never see finished is maddening to me.

Yes, The Crossing as I mentioned before looked really fucking cool.

My ass still hurts about Timesplitters 4 being cancelled. It could've been the 1st online game of the series and with the map maker, the highly customizable arcade mode, and Robofish, it might have been amazing.

Yes, Timesplitters 4 is one of the ones that hurts the most, mainly because of the online multiplayer, it really bums me out I never got to play Timesplitters multiplayer online considering how many hours I put into it with bots alone.

On the flipside to that Timesplitters 4 was looking a little weird, from what I understand it would have been a soft reboot of the franchise with a more steampunk aesthetic than science fiction, that's cool too but pretty different than the other games and at least since it would have been a reboot we got story closure with Future Perfect.

Still, story was never that important in Timesplitters and online multiplayer would have been amazing, so I still really wish 4 had happened.

 

[Syaoran Li]

City of the Dead could've been interesting, both for the fact that it'd be the first video game adaptation of Romero's films and that it would have predated Left 4 Dead and the "Zombie Boom" of the late 2000's and early 2010's.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

For me there is no question - the original Sunsoft NES Terminator prototype. After they lost the licence (due to the game being all in the future except for the final boss, and therefore not following the movie), they turned it into Journey to Silius, a decent but overly hard game. Supposedly this game is 100% complete, out there somewhere, and they did a badass promo video for it:

..so from the video, in between levels we got scenes back in 'the present' and they look good for the NES, the scene with the tanker truck chase/pipebomb explosion looks really good.

 

[Sundae]

I meant to post this a while back, so I'll go ahead and do it now before I forget again. At some point, Retro Studios came up with a concept for a DS game that was a spinoff of the Mario series, with a Boo as a playable character. There's plenty of concept art, but it doesn't look like development went past the concept stage:

And while looking for the concept art for the Boo game, I found out that Retro also made concept art for a Zelda spinoff which would have had the last male Sheik as the playable character:

Spoiler: Sheik Game Concept Art

According to gamerant:

The concept art for the unfinished Zelda project that unsurfaced was very dark and gritty, perhaps comparing closer to Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess. The art showcased Sheik, and the title was apparently going to take place within the dark timeline of Ocarina of Time. Sheik would be traveling across Hyrule as a new Gannon is birthed within a Dark Gerudo tribe. The game would be an action-JRPG.

According to Hill, both the Zelda and Boo games were canceled the week that ex-Retro leads Mark Pacini, Todd Keller, and Kynan Pearson left the company. It is likely that these games will never come to light, but just looking at the old images and information is intriguing.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Starcraft: Ghost.

It looked like it might have had some potential.

Would have been my answer for a long time too, but we've since (semi-recently I think?) seen enough real gameplay footage to know it probably would have sucked.
It was a really exciting idea to get to walk around in the StarCraft 1 universe but it looks like they were already fucking it up with neo-Blizzardness.

Still wish they'd go back to the grunge of the original setting. Not the goofy smackplay cutscenes so much, but there's so much detail in the lil prerendered guys you never focus on in-game. I used to spend weeks editing and mashing em up to make infested terran and hybrid races, etc

 

[Billy Beer]

Advent rising 2 and 3
Too Human 2 and 3
Prey 2

 

[Ruin]

Van Buren
Resident Evil 3.5
Unnamed Phantom Dust sequel
Metal Gear Acid! 3

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

For me there is no question - the original Sunsoft NES Terminator prototype. After they lost the licence (due to the game being all in the future except for the final boss, and therefore not following the movie), they turned it into Journey to Silius, a decent but overly hard game. Supposedly this game is 100% complete, out there somewhere, and they did a badass promo video for it:

..so from the video, in between levels we got scenes back in 'the present' and they look good for the NES, the scene with the tanker truck chase/pipebomb explosion looks really good.

Sunsoft were godlike on the NES, they didn't even use any of the extra chips that Nintendo made, they designed their own so they could put huge sprites on the screen. Their games often had a certain commonality in in how they looked.

 

[TFT-A9]

Would have been my answer for a long time too, but we've since (semi-recently I think?) seen enough real gameplay footage to know it probably would have sucked.
It was a really exciting idea to get to walk around in the StarCraft 1 universe but it looks like they were already fucking it up with neo-Blizzardness.

Still wish they'd go back to the grunge of the original setting. Not the goofy smackplay cutscenes so much, but there's so much detail in the lil prerendered guys you never focus on in-game. I used to spend weeks editing and mashing em up to make infested terran and hybrid races, etc

I swear Blizzard is cursed or something to ruin the very things that endeared them to people in the first place.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Cursed with billions and billions of dollars I guess. We should have taken that fucking football pig zergling in warcraft 3 as a warning.

 

[MysticMisty]

Got a good laugh out of Jew Boo. It's fun to see artists dick around drawing shit that'd never get accepted, like Jew Boo and Jesus Boo.

 

[mr.moon1488]

It's probably better that they just let it die since they were starting to move into the free-to-play garbage direction, but Deep Down is one I'm sad never came to fruition. The original concept behind the game was sort of a merging between souls like RPGs, and Dragon's Dogma. As far as it was understood, the storyline behind the game was that you worked for a company that used artifacts to "send" you into various mythological stories. Even though this might sound like a bit of Assassins Creed fuckery, it was a concept that allowed for a lot of flexibility, since you could easily branch into a variety of different cultures' myths and legends, which would help to keep things from getting too repetitive. Currently, Capcom hasn't officially canceled the game, but if it does come out, it's going to be hot garbage.

Trailer from 2013

 

[ShitlordroltihS]

Star wars battlefront 3 look like it was going to be awesome.


Maybe even groundbreaking for the time, I really really really really really really wish it was released. At least the almost finished version.

From what I've heard it was 95% complete before it got shut down.
You can find gameplay on YouTube.

Also Van Buren

 

[starborn427614]

Donkey Kong Racing...the one that got away.

 

[Blimp]

During my usual habit of refreshing the original 3D Realms homepage in hopes of a crumb of Duke Nukem/Prey 2 news, Earth No More caught my eye as looking/sounding neat, and the whole ex-Remedy hook gave me the impression it would be Max Payne-ish in presentation

3D Realms News: Earth No More Archives

The development team is specifically moving away from what they call the 'lone hero,' while also avoiding a squad-based direction

We're going to design almost every weapon in the game to where it's going to have a sort of collaborative mode to it,' says Miller. One gun called the Linker works like a reverse proton pack from Ghostbusters

The good guys aren't the only ones who can team up, however. Enemies are being designed to complement each other's skills as well

The team is intricately analyzing how group dynamics work in movies like the Alien, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and 28 Days Later, hoping to emulate that kind of tension in game form

Unfortunately, the namedrops of ideas didn't turn into an actual game, and we mostly just got some concept art and test environment screenshots, which honestly just made me think of the somewhat-maligned Crysis 2. Based on the other game they made, I doubt it would've lived up to promised scope, OR hit the target release date

Earth No More [Cancelled] - Unseen64

Preserving Details, Screenshots, Videos & more Lost Media for Earth No More [Cancelled] Help us to remember cancelled video games!

www.unseen64.net

This just looks like a worse Abuse-meets-Shadow Complex with a gravity gun

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Mega fucking man legends 3