A plea to focus on what is, rather than what could have been.
On the eve of E3, there's always that building of excitement at what will be revealed: new games, new IPs, technological advancements, and the latest in our favorite series. It's also a place where we often see a lack, a gap or space where games we expected and hoped would show up are missing. Beyond Good and Evil 2 never seems to show up, and now Prey 2 is threatening to lurch into a similar development cycle as its predecessor, and occasionally games that were anticipated are simply removed from the playing field.
And while it's true that we may have missed out on the greatness of what might have been, some canceled games come to fruition, I think it's also worth saying that we're probably better off with the cancelation of many of these potential greats, because the reality of what they actually would have become is quite simply unlikely to live up to the way-out-of-the-control hype.
It wasn't long after the cancelation of Firefly that I began to hear about Browncoats, groups of fans wearing the show's odd mix of Old West-style garb and high-tech sci-fi gear—soon having their own small conventions and get-togethers. Not that there was anything surprising about that, since the show had exemplified what many considered to be the finest virtues of American television at the time, while at the same time heavily pushing the effects envelope for a science fiction TV show; and expensively too, with a reported cost of one-and-a-half million dollars an episode.
In a way, Firefly's cancelation was a gift. It killed the show before it had the chance to acquire any of the mediocrity that simply is a part of the cycle of a standard network television series. It opened up the pathways of the imagination of what the show could be, without any of the negative reality of what most shows, even the best ones, become slowly over time. With canceled games and their idolization, this imaginative leap is even stronger, because unlike a canceled TV show, we never get to experience the game fully, only catch a glimpse of what it might be.
On one night, near the end of E3 2012, attending members of the GameRevolution staff huddled around a laptop to watch footage of a new IP that had been revealed behind closed doors. The game's footage would soon be taken offline since it had been uploaded illegally, but it had everyone amazed at what looked like a next-gen Uncharted in outer space. Everything, from surfaces and textures, to the movement of the characters and the seamless transition from cinematic to gameplay looked like it was a step beyond current games. It was the demo level of Star Wars 1313.
Star Wars 1313 continued to deliver modest updates after that E3 demo, but it wasn't long for this world. Disney purchased all the Lucas properties later that year for a tidy $4 billion dollars. It was only eight months later that Disney announced that all the LucasArts IPs had been placed on hold; and one month following that, on April 3rd, that LucasArts was being shuttered, its existing projects canceled, with an announcement that it would continue as a licensor for Lucas properties, and game development would be handled by other companies (EA eventually was announced as the benefactor of this deal).
But rather than passing in a quick, quiet death, canceled games have a habit lingering on and igniting the imagination even more than canceled television series. Partially this is because assets and videos of the tech used in the games leak as artists and developers who are unemployed buff up their resumes, portfolios, and demo reels trying to get new jobs. The games they worked on may have been canceled but they still have the work they did on them. Additionally, gameplay videos and cinematics excite us, but tell us nothing about how a game actually plays once you get your hands on it.
But the reality is never that simple when it comes to video games. Nor was that amazing gameplay trailer what Star Wars 1313 was going to be. In May of 2012, a month before E3, George Lucas reviewed the game and told the development team to refocus the game to make fan-favorite Boba Fett the protagonist instead of their new characters, changing the direction of the game completely. What was shown at E3 was what the game had been prior to this executive decision (the player character in the trailer was most likely not, as has been suggested, a "placeholder" for Boba, but the original main character). This shift from Lucas resulted in some pretty art of Fett, but ultimately meant the game was going to have to go through further redevelopment (and 1313 had originated as a Gears of War-inspired tie-in to the long-gestating but never-produced Star Wars live action TV show, Underworld) and had already been heavily redeveloped at that point.
What 1313 actually would have been is anyone's guess: Its production crew was a bizarre mish-mash of staff from all over LucasArts development, as well as people from Industrial Light and Magic—whose tech for the game was so advanced it's been shown as a potential movie-making tool. However, to say that it would have been fantastic may be looking through rose-tinted glasses.
LucasArts was known within the industry for the heavy turnovers in company presidents, with the pet projects of prior company leads being slashed or heavily redeveloped, and a series of massive restructuring every time the head of the company changed. It was run more like a movie studio in that regard, but games take longer to develop than movies, and while the executives played musical chairs, the projects suffered or were outright canceled.
During the development of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, LucasArts was also working on another (then next-gen) PS3 and Xbox 360 title, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Both titles highlighted the use of NaturalMotion's Euphoria Engine, but next-gen development on Staff of Kings was scrapped to focus on Force Unleashed (with only PS2, Wii, DS, and PSP versions of the Indiana Jones game released).
Force Unleashed, and its sequel, were met with a negative reception, in spite of the Euphoria tech being a real breakthrough in the combination of AI character actions and physics. A game cannot be sold solely by the cool things its engine can do; it has to actually be a solid game. It's quite possible, especially considering the development process that LucasArts had suffered, that 1313 might have ended up another Force Unleashed or, worse, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings; with the game's original vision and promise abandoned.
Another heavily idealized title from LucasArts that never reached fruition (despite going through multiple developers) was Battlefront III. And like 1313, Battlefront III's legend has grown more from it being canceled than what it could possibly live up to in execution. The final footage of what was said to be a prototype for the next Battlefront was an FPS with a focus on vehicular combat, but what was perhaps more exciting were closed studio Free Radical's designs for a Dark Side Episode 4-era Obi-Wan Kenobi, in tattered black robes, with golden eyes, and a red lightsaber.
I'm going to share a not-so-secret of media development with you: concept art always looks amazing. Concept designers are amazing illustrators whose job is to come up with concepts that are targets for final game models, scenarios, or environments. So it's no surprise that a Sith Lord Ben Kenobi designed for Free Radical's canceled Battlefront III looks amazingly badass. How could he not? It's the ideal playground for these artists to work with the material and get to express their imaginations.
Concept art is where every game looks like a masterpiece. But compare the character models in Free Radical's demo video to that Obi-Wan piece of art; could it, during that era of game development, aspire to that level of detail?
And while Battlefront III had not been canceled, it had started to become vaporware; forever in development, but never completed, shuffled from one canceled development team to a new one. If anything, hyped vaporware games have an even harsher path since further development updates are expected, and expected to keep up with contemporary software developments, but maintain the same excitement as the first time they were shown. Some, like Starcraft Ghost, simply fizzle out, but are never officially confirmed to be canceled, in spite of the huge excitement they inspired on creation.
Starcraft Ghost is a game worth discussing, a third-person stealth shooter that these days is pure vaporware, not even being developed at Blizzard. But every year the question is asked of the Blizzard overlords, and every year, some executive of some sort says something on the lines of "It's on hold, not dead." You can find listings of these questions and answers simply by doing a simple web search for the game. Looking for a grounding on what happened, the web search also showed that the generally least informative source, its Urban Dictionary entry, was perhaps the most informative and concise, if speculative:
A Blizzard Entertainment game, from the StarCraft series that started development in 2001, with a planned release date between 2002 and 2003, but development had been placed on hiatus as of 2006.
Planned initially for the PS2 and Xbox game systems, a GameCube version was also in the works, but canceled in 2005. The employees of Nihilistic Software, the company that was developing the game, had quit en masse due to an internal power struggle with Blizzard, and Swingin' Ape Studios was acquired by Blizzard to continue work, at which point the GCN version was dropped to concentrate on the other two versions.
A walkout of employees from Nihilistic is, of course, unverified, and is one of those rumors you see floating around on forums, with little in the way of substantiation. Blizzard clearly hasn't abandoned Ghost as a brand, with a novel released in 2006, a trio of graphic novels from Tokyo Pop in 2009-10 (before the manga publisher shuddered to a halt in 2011), and another novel in 2011, keeping the legacy alive. Interest is still clearly palpable for a game first revealed in 2001, though with such a long legacy of expectation, how can they possibly deliver a game that would satisfy the long-waiting fans?
Perhaps this is why Half-Life 3 simply never shows up—a game whose development is so under wraps that in Reddit AMAs and other interviews, Valve head Gabe Newell doesn't refer to it directly, but jokingly as Ricochet 2, a reference to an early Half-Life mod. Perhaps this is also why Final Fantasy Versus XIII took so long in development that it became Final Fantasy XV, not because the existing development has not been adequate or exemplary, even when compared to prior entries in the series, but simply because the expectation is so high that unless it is truly revolutionary, it cannot match the quality demanded.
Though not all canceled (or vaporware) games follow the path of Starcraft Ghost or Star Wars 1313, games can be canceled for political or ideological reasons. Six Days in Fallujah, created by Atomic Games, was developed after soldiers, with whom the developer had worked, returned from the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. They created the game with the idea of presenting the combat experiences of the troops in a way to bring a realistic sense of the fear and uncertainty of urban combat to gaming. With the war so close, and the battle so recent, the game was put on hold after controversy over how it might be seen as exploitative and how it would concern anti-Islamic sentiment. While Atomic wants to see the game published, seeing it as a tribute to the soldiers who served during the battle, no publishers have yet been willing to touch it.
Perhaps a more politically fraught tale is that of Ubisoft and Red Storm's Rainbow Six: Patriots. Patriots distinguished itself with a trailer that featured military insurgents, homegrown militiamen calling themselves the True Patriots, who abduct a man who got rich during the financial collapse and force him to wear an explosive vest. These men in the Patriots trailer, who were meant to be the game's villains, were cited as inspiration in a recent May 26th New Yorker article, "Rogue Element," for an insurgent American militia group, called FEAR, that grew out of discontented military and ex-military personnel, several of whom were convicted of murder for their actions as part of the group.
Patriots has been on hold as the development team has been replaced and rebuilt from the ground up, and it has recently suggested that if it is released, it may not be called Patriots at all. While it's not unusual for games to undergo massive changes in content and style during development, that a game trailer inspired a group of men who eventually committed real homicides is a sobering fact that no doubt must weigh on Ubisoft and Red Storm in continuing development of the brand.
These games raise the question not of why a game was canceled, but whether or not it should have been created in the first place. Is a game that fuels an ideology of domestic terror justified in existing? For better or worse, chances are triple-A publishers and developers are not likely to take the bet that it is.
On a more domestic level, many canceled, high-profile games could have potentially been amazing, but it also bears keeping in mind that they were canceled for a reason. In the case of 1313, the game was canceled because LucasArts developments were discontinued. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that it was actually a good game, and the decision to dissolve LucasArts may have rested on the question of how strong the existing IPs were. Similarly, Bionic Commando developer Grin folded after Square-Enix reportedly decided they no longer cared for the Nordic direction of their Final Fantasy XII tie in, Fortress, and simply stopped paying them for it. But whether the game was good at all is anyone's guess. Whether it had even developed far enough to make that determination is another question altogether.
Perhaps the greatest argument against the revival or championing of canceled games is what happens when vaporware finally, unexpectedly, comes to fruition. These are games like Prey which sort of arrive and fizzle out, spectacular failures of delayed games like Daikatana and especially Duke Nukem Forever, famous for its never-ending development and constant addition of new ideas and mechanics. The teasers were consistently amazing at first, until the final game arrived as a package of a continuous decade of development ideas without a unifying direction and cruddy implementation, with a plot and characters that were stuck back in the '90s, but without the benefit of throwback charm.
Duke Nukem Forever was—beyond the poetic schaudenfreude of a game whose inclusion of "Forever" in the title seemed to indicate how long it would be in development—a critical and commercial failure that probably should have sunk along with original developer 3D Realms which went out of business in 2009. However, Gearbox purchased the game and finished it, giving the world a chance to see just what a 14-year development cycle could generate. It may not have been the worst bet, since the name still has brand recognition, and Gearbox may be able to create newer, more cohesive titles in the brand.
Games that are canceled outright or let go by studios, but have potential, are often bought and salvaged by other developers or studios. When THQ folded, for instance, the more promising properties in development (South Park: The Stick of Truth, Saints Row IV, etc) were bought by other publishers, while other IPs and franchises (Darksiders just barely squeaked in at Nordic games) are abandoned. There were rumors that EA was potentially going to purchase Star Wars 1313, and LucasArts other Star Wars games in development, but clearly they passed and decided instead on internal development, farming out Battlefront to DICE and other game concepts to Bioware and Visceral. It's worth suggesting that they may have made the right decision based on what was there.
Games that are canceled, whether for financial, political, or executive decisions, remain in an unfinished state. Regardless of talent or the excellence of the work that has been put into them, what we see is never indicative of a completed project. What we as the gaming public are allowed to see are only the best fragments of that unfinished development, the gems that shined the brightest. But these gems do not represent what the finished game would be, and might not even have ended up included in the title.
It's probably best, in cases where games have been canceled and remain un-rescued, to recognize that we are often seeing the best of what could be salvaged from a sinking ship. Those concept designs and gameplay videos are whatever valuables could be carried off. What we never see is the hull that rotted through, causing the ship to settle deep beneath the detectable horizon.
