From units sold to public opinion, it’s hard to deny the idea that the PlayStation 2 is the most popular and beloved video game console ever made. The video game industry might be a lot bigger now than it was at the turn of the millennium, but that just makes the PS2’s ridiculous level of cultural awareness even more impressive. Unfortunately, you don’t reach that level of infamy without losing a few games along the way.
With a huge library of canceled games for the PS2, just like the PS1, there’s plenty of unanswered questions of what could have been when it comes to the PlayStation 2, so we’re looking into this abandoned back catalog to explore the fates of a bunch of canceled PS2 games. Whether due to publisher intervention, internal conflict or other reasons entirely, we’ll never quite get to see what these games could have been.
1. Daredevil: The Man Without Fear
Perhaps one of the most underrated and overlooked members of Marvel’s heroes gallery, Daredevil has never really been given the opportunity to shine in his own video game like Spider-Man, Hulk and even The Punisher have. That’s not for a lack of trying though, as before the much maligned Ben Affleck film launched in 2003, 5,000 Ft and Encore Inc were working with Marvel to create a Daredevil game that would have followed a similar mold to the popular Spider-Man PS2 games.
Titled Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, named after the Frank Miller comic run, this adaptation would have been an action beat ‘em up and would see players dealing with a power vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen following the supposed assassination of the Kingpin. As for why the game was canceled, the full story can be found on Hidden Palace, but the short version is that Sony were asking too much of the developers, with requests that contradicted withstanding agreements with Marvel. Neither side were willing to budge and the game was canceled as a result, though in 2023, a prototype of the game was leaked online, letting people see the game for themselves finally.
2. Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse
Before games like Darksiders gave us a view of what the four horsemen might look like in a video game, The 3DO Company had a go at creating such a game for the PS2. Their effort, the aptly titled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is about as aggressively early 2000s as it gets, with one of the supposed plot points of the game being Archangel Abbadon teaming up with a teenage prostitute, a preacher/serial killer and a corrupt US Senator to fight the eponymous horsemen. The only element missing is Shadow The Hedgehog holding a Glock.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse reportedly had a lot of talent behind it, with 3DO teaming with plenty of Hollywood talent in order to achieve their vision of the game. The game would be shown at E3 2003, and while previews weren’t exactly glowing, there was a cautious optimism about this weird little beat ‘em up. However, 3DO would ultimately go bankrupt just a few days after those first initial previews dropped, and while the game’s creator and development director Michael Mendheim did purchase the rights to the property, no game ever materialized.
3. Shadow of the Sun
The PS2 had its fair share of supernatural first-person shooters, between the likes of Darkwatch, Return To Castle Wolfenstein and those zombie levels that popped up throughout the TimeSplitters series. It’s only natural that there were more planned for release on Sony’s iconic console, but for whatever reason, they never managed to launch. One such game is Shadow of the Sun, which could have been a decent spiritual predecessor to Darkwatch, but the fates had other ideas.
Originally starting life as a horror game called Asylum, developed by the UK-based Darkblack, that version of the game died when the company handling the rights, Octagon Entertainment, encountered financial difficulties, leading to Darkblack running out of cash. Darkblack closed, but immediately reformed as Hothead Studios in 2003, with the plan of using the same engine from Asylum to create the shooter Shadow of the Sun, about a vampire lord seeking revenge on his council. Hothead couldn’t find a publisher though, and the studio would close before the end of the year.
4. City Of The Dead
No one quite did zombies like George A Romero, so with the success of the likes of Resident Evil, it was only natural that some game developers would want to get the man himself involved in a video game. While you could count Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green as one such game, it was originally conceived and finished as a different game entirely, which is why the cancelation of City of the Dead stings so much. Had this game launched, it could have been the perfect video game tribute to schlocky, grindhouse zombie horror.
Alongside Romero’s contributions to the game, City of the Dead would have also featured longtime horror movie make-up artist/actor/icon Tom Savini in a main role, while American McGee, the auteur behind the Alice video games, was also involved. Previews promised an almost excessive amount of gore from this game, but when publisher Hip Interactive filed for bankruptcy just two months after the game was revealed, developers Kuju Entertainment couldn’t find a publisher to support their vision.
5. Starcraft: Ghost
Taking a massive scale game like Starcraft and bringing it down to the ground level isn’t exactly a new concept, but it’s one that doesn’t seem to find a lot of success. Spartan: Total Warrior might have been a fun, albeit brainless slasher take on Total War’s epic battles, but that seems to be the only real hit. Starcraft: Ghost could have had the potential to join this select club if it managed to find its way to release, but Blizzard could just never get their priorities to line up.
A third person shooter instead of a top-down strategy game, Starcraft: Ghost would have followed Nova, a character originally created for the video game. The game was stuck in development hell for a while, changing developers at least once, before Blizzard announced the game was on “indefinite hold” in 2006. It was eventually canceled in 2014, though it’s likely that no one was working on it in those intervening 8 years. Still, at least the character of Nova has become a key part of Starcraft’s lore, with multiple books and even her own DLC campaign for Starcraft 2.
6. Capcom Fighting All-Stars
Perhaps one of Capcom’s greatest “what-ifs” when it comes to their fighting games, Capcom Fighting All-Stars was set to be a huge departure from the norm for the Japanese giant. While Capcom had allowed Arika to make 2.5D Street Fighter in the EX series, Capcom Fighting All-Stars would have seen Capcom themselves making a fully 3D fighting game experience, similar to Tekken or Virtua Fighter. Sadly, local testing of the game at Japanese arcades led to lots of negative feedback, and Capcom made the decision to just pull the plug on this one.
While the footage that has been shown of Capcom Fighting All-Stars points to a game that might not have been able to compete with the already established titans of 3D fighting, even with all the crossover characters that it offers. Despite that, it’s still interesting to think about what would have happened if CFAS did launch, because maybe then we wouldn’t have received the rushjob that Capcom Fighting Evolution was. Slapping together sprites doesn’t just lead to a great fighting game.
7. Invasion
Sometimes, games are just a bit too advanced for the console they’re aiming for. Invasion is one such game, as developers Turbine Inc tried to turn their MMO expertise towards the PS2. Having already created the Asheron’s Call series, Invasion was supposed to be a MMO catered towards the console market. Single-player gamers would still get a complete campaign with missions and levels, but the online was where the true focus lied.
Not much has been revealed about the game itself, or the reasons why it was canceled, as the footage that has been leaked to the world in the years since shows a graphically impressive PS2 game. For 2003, Invasion looked fantastic, though the actual gameplay might be where the developers ran into some trouble. That, or the challenges of trying to make an online game for the PS2, which notoriously struggled with its online offerings, finally did the game in.
8. Skate Or Die
Criterion might be best remembered for their work on the incredible Burnout series (which still needs reviving, please and thank you), but before Burnout took off in a big way, Criterion earned plenty of critical acclaim for their work on TrickStyle and Airblade. While both games might have focused on hoverboards instead of skateboards with wheels, the similarities in gameplay between the two, and the meteoric rise in popularity of the Tony Hawk’s series of games, led EA to commission Criterion to create a new Skate Or Die game.
Anyway, EA and Criterion had big plans in place for the Skate Or Die reboot, with reports stating that the game would have included features like on-foot travel, which would have been revolutionary in a pre-Tony Hawk’s Underground world. Unfortunately, EA began to demand too much of the project, hoping to compete with not only Tony Hawk but GTA too, and Criterion decided to end development on Skate or Die, creating a rift between Criterion and EA, but those bridges were soon mended as both worked on Burnout 3: Takedown.
9. Freedom Fighters 2
Perhaps one of the cult classic third person shooters on the PS2, Freedom Fighters might have featured a pretty tired premise of “Russians are bad, they’re doing a big invade”, but it’s the execution which made it so memorable. Instead of being a one man army, you could recruit a squad of up to 12 fellow freedom lovers, ordering them around New York as they try to resist the Russian occupation. The first game was pretty widely beloved when it launched in 2003, and by April 2004, a sequel had been greenlit. 20 years later, we’re still waiting.
Quite why Freedom Fighters 2 never got made hasn’t been confirmed by anyone at IO Interactive, though in 2006, the company announced they’d be working on Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a third person shooter with squad-like commands. It’s possible that IO Interactive liked the gameplay they’d developed with Freedom Fighters, but felt they had more of a chance of success with a new IP about robbing banks than a fight for America’s liberty. When IO split from Square Enix though, one of the main points for IO is that they still held the rights to Freedom Fighters, so hopefully we’ll see them revisit this one soon. Maybe after the 007 game.
10. Monster Island
Before Irrational changed the horror FPS genre with Bioshock, the team might have had a bold new take on the strategy genre/creature feature genre with Monster Island. Not to be confused with Monsters Inc: Scare Island, Irrational’s Monster Island would have seen players controlling either one of 20 different monsters, each with their own powers and abilities, or the law enforcement of a densely populated city, struggling to cope with this sudden appearance of a kaiju attack.
Pitched basically as Rampage meets Lionhead’s often forgotten classic Black & White, Monster Island could have blazed a new trail for the real time strategy genre, a niche that’s typically struggled to gain any real traction in the console gaming space. As for why the game was canceled, Irrational Games never really gave details as to why, only announcing the game’s existence in 2010 long after the project had been shut down. Despite that, Monster Island would definitely be a cool idea someone could revisit in the future. Those fully destructible cities on today’s consoles? We’re sold.
11. The Big One
The PS2 era introduced the world to the disaster survival genre of games, which is precisely what it sounds like. Sure, that genre might have consisted entirely of the first two Disaster Report games, but they still offered a kind of survival horror that gamers weren’t quite used to at this point. In a certain way, earthquakes and floods are a lot more terrifying than zombie dogs and whatever the hell Nemesis is, but development studio Melbourne House had their own take, The Big One, that unfortunately was canceled before it could release.
Named after the hypothetical earthquake on the San Andreas faultline that’s predicted to devastate southern California, The Big One would have seen players controlling multiple characters across this damaged city. Each character would have their own abilities based on their background, and there would even be a karma system based on player choices. However, despite a promising demo, the game was ultimately canceled, with owners Atari seemingly choosing to have the developers work on a port to Test Drive Unlimited over a risky game like The Big One.
12. Campfire: Become Your Nightmare
Before games like Dead By Daylight, Slayaway Camp and Naughty Bear (game of the year, every year) allowed you to play as a sociopathic slasher villain, Daydream Software had a pitch for a game called Campfire: Become Your Nightmare. Billed as a “reverse survival horror” game of sorts, Campfire would have seen players terrorizing the poor camp counselors and locals of a rural campground, though how that would have played out over a single-player game hasn’t been revealed.
Perhaps this confusion on what the “point” of Campfire: Become Your Nightmare meant that the game struggled to find a publisher, as the game was canceled before it was even announced. The only reference to the game can be found on Unseen64, stating that the game was in development in 2003, though an old Daydream Software listing seems to suggest that Campfire would have been published by Sony. If we were to speculate, perhaps the controversy surrounding another 2003 release, Manhunt, one of the most violent games ever made, made the developers and/or publisher a bit too scared to publish a game as morbid as Campfire.
13. Specwarrior
We should have put more respect on the name of Pandemic Studios while they were around. Sure, Pandemic might have only made a bunch of third person shooters, but they were all really good. Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans and Star Wars Battlefront are all classics at this point, though many might forget that Pandemic worked on Full Spectrum Warrior, a tactical shooter set in the Middle East. However, Pandemic were working on the formula beforehand in a game called Specwarrior, which would have been published by Midway.
The gameplay for Specwarrior would have been similar to what Full Spectrum Warrior became, but with the game set during the Vietnam War instead of the Middle East. It was reported that Midway canceled the development of Specwarrior about a year into the game’s development, with Pandemic moving on to a professional relationship with THQ. After Specwarrior was canceled, Pandemic went on to sue Midway for breach of contract, alleging that Midway canceled the game to avoid paying the developers.
14. Snake Plissken Chronicles/Snake Plissken’s Escape
Escape From New York and Escape From L.A. are widely considered to be two of Kurt Russell and John Carpenter’s greatest hits, and the character of Snake Plissken has been pretty influential on video games as a whole. Metal Gear Solid’s Snake design didn’t just fall out of thin air, after all. Despite that, there hasn’t been a proper game based on the Escape series, but Namco did try to make it happen in the 2000s, though the project was canceled for unknown reasons.
The project, known as Snake Plissken Chronicles or Snake Plissken’s Escape, would have seen Kurt Russell fully scanned and voicing Snake Plissken, while John Carpenter and writing partner Debra Hill approved the game’s story. Meanwhile the game would have been developed by the same team who created Dead To Rights 2. Reportedly, the game was pretty far into development, with a playable demo being circulated and a planned release date of Christmas 2005, but there was no escape for Snake Plissken this time around.
Intriguingly though, as we were writing this article, news broke regarding rumors of a new Escape From New York game being made by the folks at Slipgate Ironworks, so maybe we’ll see Snake Plissken ride again in a video game after all.
15. Taxi Driver
There were plenty of movie tie-ins that were greenlit over the PS2 era, and while most of them were terrible (usually anything remotely related to a kid’s film), there were some that were incredible. The Warriors, Scarface: The World Is Yours and From Russia With Love all blew players away, and if Majesco and Papaya Studios had anything to say about it, you could have added Taxi Driver to the list. The reason why it was canceled? The film’s creator Martin Scorsese.
Majesco and Papaya basically had everything ready to go. The game was well into production, following a similar premise to Scarface: The World Is Yours of offering an alternative ending to the film, along with an open world setting, and De Niro even agreed to provide limited voice acting. Both director Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader were unhappy with the game’s existence, but neither party could do anything about it as the rights to Taxi Driver were signed away thirty years back. One alleged threat of blacklisting from Marty later, combined with the commercial failure of Advent Rising and Psychonauts, and Majesco would end 2005 in severe financial troubles.
16. Doomsday Rescue
If there’s one genre that received a lot of love during the PS2 era, it’s the car combat game. Pioneered by the likes of Twisted Metal, you could also see games like WWE Crush Hour and, if developers Beyond Games managed to finish their game, Doomsday Rescue. Conceived as a post-apocalyptic blend of both Twisted Metal and Crazy Taxi, the game would have seen players trying to deliver civilians to evacuation zones in the midst of an alien invasion.
While Doomsday Rescue was announced in 2002 and even covered in outlets like Gamespot, the project was canceled before it was finished. No reason for the cancellation of Doomsday Rescue has ever been given, though some have theorized that it was due to Beyond Games’ bankruptcy before the end of the year. On top of that, it’s possible that Midway canceled Doomsday Rescue because they already had another vehicular combat game on the way, Roadkill.
A third theory, however, comes from a comment on the Unseen64 video seen above. Allegedly, the commenter is a former Beyond Games staffer by the name Joshua Vaughn, who is credited as the 3D Level Artist for Hot Wheels: Velocity X, another Beyond Games production that was being developed at the same time. According to the comment, 9/11 happening during development made the production of a game about city and landmark destruction “suboptimal”. If true, it likely wasn’t the main reason why Doomsday Rescue was canceled, but it definitely wouldn’t have helped.
17. WCW Mayhem 2
Sometimes a cancellation is through no fault at all of the game developers in question. Occasionally, outside factors come in to ruin what someone has been working hard on, and WCW Mayhem 2 is the perfect example of that. After the plane crash that was WCW Backstage Assault, EA set to work on WCW Mayhem 2, and even recruited iconic wrestling game developers AKI Corporation to work their magic on the sequel. The problem? WWF’s purchase of WCW in March 2001 rendered EA’s publishing deal void.
Still, even if WCW Mayhem 2’s wasn’t canceled because WWF purchased their rival wrestling company, it probably would have been canned by the fact WCW was hemorrhaging money and about to go out of business anyway. It wasn’t all bad news for EA and the AKI Corporation though, as the technology and development already invested into WCW Mayhem 2 was transferred over to Def Jam: Vendetta.
18. Orchid
Another Namco game that was seemingly canceled out of the blue, Orchid was a 3D beat ‘em up that was in development over at the UK studio Argonaut Games. When the project was initially revealed in 2002, Orchid sported a cel-shaded graphical style that many games in the PS2 era were opting for. The game would have followed an amnesiac girl on the run from a shadowy corporation, with the girl in question battering an army of goons to get what she wants. It wouldn’t be a PS2 game if there wasn’t a horde of goons looking to taste some knuckle sandwiches.
Development on Orchid seemed to be progressing suitably well, with Argonaut managing to secure Namco as a publisher in late 2002, but by May 2003, Orchid would be canceled by Namco themselves. According to Namco, the investment wouldn’t match the potential returns, with Argonaut Chairman Julian Paul calling the decision “disappointing”. Orchid’s cancellation didn’t stop the partnership between Namco and Argonaut though, as the two would continue to work together on 2003’s I-Ninja.
19. Road To Sunday
There’s only so many ways you can try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sports games, and the solution is often about the action that occurs off the field than on it. That was the approach that developers 989 Sports (later known as SCEA Sports) decided to take with Road To Sunday, which would have certainly offered a unique approach to American Football than traditional Madden games. Instead of controlling a regular team, you’d instead inherit a football team after your dad dies in a mysterious explosion.
If that’s not ridiculous enough already, you’d also inherit your father’s debt with a Jamaican crime lord, with you now having to use your football team, the Los Angeles Show, to pay off this debt. Reportedly, the game would have included gambling, an underground fighting league, and Position Specific Gameplay that would help reinforce the mission-based gameplay loop. It sounds interesting enough, but according to Ron Eagle, the PR manager for SCEA Sports, Road To Sunday just didn’t live up to internal expectations.
20. Dragonkind
Turns out it wasn’t just the Xbox One that lost out on a dragon-controlling action-RPG, as in 2002, TriLunar announced they’d be working on an ambitious 3D RPG called Dragonkind. Scheduled for release in 2004, Dragonkind would have followed a protagonist by the name of Grail, who discovers he has the ability to control dragons. Sounds like it’d be a pretty useful power, but being able to summon your dragon mates also causes Grail a lot of problems too.
Announced in April 2002, Dragonkind certainly seemed like it’d be a promising RPG, but just four months later in August, developers TriLunar announced that they’d be ceasing operations permanently. According to the devs on their official website, the funds TriLunar had access to were raised “100% internally”, and without access to any external funding, the team were left with no choice but to close. It’s a real shame, as Dragonkind could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other underrated PS2 gems like Rogue Galaxy.
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