Sometimes, it’s frankly unbelievable that any game manages to make it out of the door at all. You’re telling me 100 people put numbers into a computer, and now this digital horse has its own pooping schedule? How does this even work? Is God alright with this?
Sadly, though, as a wise man once said: what be will, be will, and sometimes games just get canceled, whether it’s due to publisher meddling, a lack of funds or the creative vision simply not panning out. That doesn’t mean I can’t still whinge about them though.
City of the Dead
Given George A. Romero’s legendary zombie movie pantheon, it’s shocking that there haven’t been that many games about them.
The relationship between Romero and video games, or lack thereof but not for a lack of trying, is pretty fascinating.
An original, properly Romero-backed zombie game could have been incredible. Sadly, it never came to pass before his death, though it doesn’t mean there weren’t attempts, with City of the Dead being the most notable.
Developed by Kuju Entertainment, City of the Dead would’ve seen an island overwhelmed with zombies thanks to some military meddling. Naturally, it’d be on you to survive, blasting as many zombie heads as possible. Intriguingly, the developers cited the racing game Burnout 3 as one of their inspirations, and would also feature longtime Romero collaborator, actor and renowned makeup artist Tom Savini in a featured role. Even the legendary game developer American McGee, responsible for the cult classic Alice games, was lending a hand with City of the Dead, which is a frankly ridiculous collection of talent.
Unfortunately, publisher Hip Interactive went bankrupt in 2005, and despite Kuju’s attempts to find a new publisher, City of the Dead was left dead in the water. Considering Romero apparently thought people didn’t care that much about him towards the end, it just really makes this one, and all of his other projects that never got off the ground, a little extra sad, and it genuinely bothers me quite a lot to think he might not have felt loved for his work.
Star Wars 1313
Star Wars lays claim to its fair share of canceled games, like Battle of the Sith Lords and The Force Unleashed 3 being killed before they could see the light of day. There was also Project Ragtag, the third person adventure developed by Visceral Games and Amy Hennig, the creator of the Uncharted series. However, ask any Star Wars fan what the biggest canceled game was, and they’ll likely reply with Star Wars 1313, and then maybe look at their copy of Star Wars Outlaws a little like this.
Set on the city planet of Coruscant, Star Wars 1313 would have seen players controlling a young Boba Fett as he fights his way through the shady underworld of this galaxy far, far away. That’s everything you need to hear, isn’t it? Easiest sell in video game history, right? Well, somehow, it wasn’t.
The gameplay trailers and footage shown when the game was announced in 2012 promised an adventure at the same level of bombast and spectacle you’d expect from a AAA third person shooter, but with laser blasters instead of regular pistols. It also just looked absolutely incredible graphically, and I’m not someone who massively cares about fidelity, but this genuinely looks visually just tonnes better than a lot of more recent Star Wars games
Despite the promising premise however, 1313 was fed to the Sarlacc Pit before it could be finished after Disney’s acquisition of Lucasarts.
Silent Hills
It’s basically a rule that if you’re talking about canceled games, you have to throw a mention to Silent Hills. In what could be the biggest bag fumble of all time, a degrading and increasingly toxic professional relationship between auteur creator Hideo Kojima and Konami robbed players of a new vision of the Silent Hill series, which would have seen the Metal Gear creator collaborate with acclaimed horror director Guillermo Del Toro. The ridiculousness those two could have come up with together could have been astonishing, and it’s a crying shame we never got to see their vision play out.
What stings even more about this particular cancellation is that players were given the opportunity to experience just a small taste of what could have been thanks to the Playable Teaser, also known as P.T. The now infamous PS4 demo scared the crap out of players back in 2014, so much so that indie developers and even creators on games like Dreams have been working to recreate the experience ever since.
If it wasn’t canceled, Silent Hills could have been a real game changer for the horror genre — and not just in video games. Thanks to PT alone, we did get a lot of new ideas in the horror space, so at least its influence cannot be denied.
Titanfall 3
While it was always assumed that Respawn Entertainment canceled their development on Titanfall 3 in order to create the acclaimed, well previously acclaimed, battle royale Apex Legends, it was never properly confirmed for the longest time, likely through shame as they are cowards and fiends. However, in 2023, an ex Respawn developer did mention in an interview with content creator The Burnettwork that after working on Titanfall 3 for 10 months, the project was canceled in favor of Apex Legends, with the developers citing the success of PUBG as the reason why.
Mohammad Alavi, the ex-developer in question, claimed that the internal feeling within Respawn while developing Titanfall 3 wasn’t quite the same as the previous game, stating: “[Titanfall 3] was on par to be just as good if not better than whatever we had before, right? But…it wasn’t revolutionary. And that’s the key thing, right? And we were feeling pretty decent about it, but not the same feeling as Titanfall 2 where we were making something revolutionary, y’know what I mean?”
I do not know what he means, personally. Titanfall 2 is one of the best FPS games of all time, and not every sequel needs to reinvent the wheel when they can build on what was there. Just do the second game but I dunno, let me put a funny hat on BT this time. He’d suit a beret.
Because of this feeling, Respawn ultimately made the decision to cancel Titanfall 3, though the amount of fans crying out for a new Titanfall will hopefully make Respawn reconsider eventually.
Scalebound
The canceled project that caused a lot of people to lose faith in Xbox’s overall strategy in the 2010s, Scalebound has become kind of like the white whale for fans of Uncle Phil’s suite of consoles. It feels like every time Xbox announces a new and exciting exclusive, some of the online comments or sentiments immediately switch to “bring back Scalebound”, a sentiment even shared by Platinum’s own staff.
An action RPG, Scalebound was supposed to have seen up to four players join together in online co-op, with each player ordering their pet dragon to annihilate anything in the vicinity. The gameplay we saw promised something truly chaotic that the Xbox One probably wouldn’t have been equipped to handle, especially those 2013 models that I’m pretty sure are about to go thermonuclear at this point in their lives. But to be fair, it does seem like Platinum were also pretty inexperienced with the Unreal Engine themselves.
However, the Xbox Series X, or even Xbox’s next console, which is apparently going to be your dog at this point, could handle something like Scalebound, and Platinum have probably learned a few things since then, so hopefully this one gets revisited.
Agent
Is it “suffering from success” when you cancel a game in order to focus on what would become one of the biggest games of all time? That’s the question asked of Rockstar, who diverted resources away from their announced Cold War spy thriller Agent, which was planned to be PS3 exclusive, in order to work on Grand Theft Auto 5. Given how GTA 5 has become one of the highest grossing games of all time and the excitement for its sequel is arguably bigger than ever, they probably made the right choice, but I’ll still miss what Agent could have been. And really, it just speaks to how much Rockstar has changed since their PS2 days.
We never saw too much of it, though, apart from that initial logo reveal when it was announced at E3 2009, and then way, way later in 2017 some concept art leaked.
In a blog post from 2023 (which has since been removed), ex-Rockstar Games technical dev Obbe Vermeij spoke about why the game had been canceled: “[Agent] wasn’t progressing as well as we’d hoped…We tried to cut the game down in an attempt to get the bulk of it done before the inevitable call from New York would come…It became clear that [Agent] was going to be too much of a distraction for us and we ditched it.”
It sucks that maybe we were denied basically Max Payne meets James Bond, but still, the dreams of a high budget spy thriller live on thanks to IO Interactive’s upcoming 007 game.
LMNO
Steven Spielberg has been a long-time video game collaborator, having helped create the Medal Of Honor series after making Saving Private Ryan. A lot of his films have also received the video game tie-in treatment, like The Adventures of Tintin, Minority Report, Indiana Jones and something else that I can’t remember, but even a bankable name like Spielberg isn’t enough to help get a project to the finish line, as was the case with LMNO.
A first person adventure game with parkour elements, LMNO was developed by both EA and Arkane Studios. The story would have seen the player character rescuing an alien named Eve from a secret lab, before engaging on a road trip from the east coast of America to the west. What’s neat is that it was pretty ambitious The project was officially canceled in 2010, though reports suggest it may have been canceled even earlier, with former LMNO artist Jake Kazdal insinuating that LMNO was canned due to its similarities to Mirror’s Edge, another EA game:
“I’m sure anybody you ask is gonna tell you something a little bit different, but [LMNO] didn’t end up ever taking off. There was some rival game stuff that may or may not have come out of EA that was basically the same thing minus some of the stuff we were doing. There was just a lot of politics.”
Zone Of The Enders 3
For those who grew up playing the PS1 or PS2, there were one of two mech games you’d consider the best: Armored Core or Zone of the Enders. With FromSoftware’s recent revival of the Armored Core series on modern platforms, it’s clear which series has managed to stand the test of time, but there was supposed to be a third entry in the criminally underrated Zone of the Enders series. What that entry would have looked like is unclear, but it seems like plans for ZOTE 3 were canceled before they could even start. They were spawn-camped, if you will.
After the release of the Zone of the Enders HD Collection, series creator Hideo Kojima took to his radio show in May 2013 to talk about player feedback regarding the collection. According to him, he received a lot of player feedback that the collection failed to live up to player expectations regarding performance, as the jump from 30fps to 60fps led to a lot of choppiness. Because of them trying to fix the issues, something new in Zone of the Enders was put on the backburner, where it still remains.
As of right now, enhanced ports of ZOTE: The 2nd Runner are available on PC and PlayStation, but no ZOTE 3 is on the horizon, especially after all that previously mentioned Konami/Kojima beef.
TimeSplitters 4
Depending on what you consider to be “TimeSplitters 4”, we could actually talk about two completely different cancellations here. The Embracer Group cancellation at the end of 2023 for what appeared to be a TimeSplitters reboot/remake still stings, and the fact that they wanted to make it a Fortnite clone both stings and sucks like some kind of weird bee harlot, but during the original version of Free Radical, plans were in place for a brand new entry into the series after the third entry, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. As you already know, those plans never came to fruition, and we haven’t seen a new TimeSplitters game in 20 years.
After the flop that was Haze, Free Radical had attempted to create TimeSplitters 4 before they went into administration in late 2008, before being renamed as Crytek UK in 2009. An early build of TimeSplitters 4 was shown to potential publishers, but according to Crytek UK Managing Director Karl Hilton when speaking to GamesTM in 2012, publishers were gunshy about investing in both TimeSplitters and Free Radical as a whole.
Hilton said: “The unanimous opinion among all publishers that we pitched TimeSplitters 4 to is that you can’t market a game that is based around a diverse set of characters and environments – you need a clear and easily communicated marketing message, and TimeSplitters doesn’t have one.”
Star Wars Battlefront 3
Man, Free Radical just absolutely could not catch a break after the original TimeSplitters trilogy. Haze might have stank up the joint when it launched, despite what Korn’s Jonathan Davis would have had you believe, but the real reason for the studio’s eventual closure is likely due to what happened behind the scenes.
Just before they went bankrupt, Free Radical were approached by Activision to create a GoldenEye remake for PS3 and Xbox 360, but negotiations fell through. The real kick in the teeth though is that EA also canceled their work on Star Wars Battlefront 3 around the same time.
With Free Radical in dire straits in 2008, Battlefront 3 could have changed their fortune. However, according to studio co-founder Steve Ellis when speaking to GamesTM, the project was canned even though it was 99% complete. It should sound ridiculous, but in current times trademark, where executives do the dumbest stuff on a daily basis, it really isn’t.
Ellis said on the cancellation: “We had a 99 percent finished game that just needed bug fixing for release. It should have been our most successful game, but it was cancelled for financial reasons.” Fellow co-founder David Doak also remarked: “[W]e went from talking to people who were passionate about making games to talking to psychopaths who insisted on having an unpleasant lawyer in the room.”
And that really kind of sums up where games have changed the most really, doesn’t it? Obviously, the video game industry has always been about doing business, but modern publishers really do take the love of the game out of the games.
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