As someone who grew up in a time when we were drip-fed gaming news in the form of magazines that would hit newsstands or our mailboxes on a monthly basis, I've long held a fascination with vaporware/unreleased games. As a kid I'd see a preview for an upcoming game in EGM or GamePro that caught my interest, and then the months and years would roll on without that game ever seeing release. Whenever I'd come across a situation like this I always enjoyed going back to old issues of magazines to look at the only screenshots/info that remained of those unreleased games.
Nowadays we have sites like Unseen64 to act as preservation hubs for any and all information that we can drudge up about cancelled, unreleased, or beta versions of games. This is fantastic, IMO, and I really appreciate all the work that the Unseen64 collective has done over the years to preserve these ephemeral games that never came to fruition. They put out some really great video content these days as well, and they recently published a thick tome that physically preserves a metric ton of info on some of the most interesting lost games over the course of gaming history.
So I've always had certain cancelled games that always interested me the most, and I thought I'd pose the question to GAF as well to see what others think and maybe even stumble upon some interesting vaporware that I hadn't heard of before.
When I was young, without a doubt the game cancellation that was the most deeply felt by me at the time was Thrill Kill.
I was a child of the arcades during the early 90's, and I had a particular fondness for the Mortal Kombat series and all of the other violent fighting games that followed in the wake of MK's success. Blood and gore was a novel thing to be in gaming at the time, so I was naturally drawn to violent games. When the PS1 came onto the scene, it differentiated itself from its competitors by building a distinctly darker and edgier library right out the gate with titles like Twisted Metal appealing to an older audience. Being the blood-lover that I was, the very first game that I got with my PS1 in 1996 was Loaded.
I think the first time that I saw mention of Thrill Kill was in an Ultra Game Players magazine, and the screenshots immediately caught my eye with their dark aesthetic and gobs of blood flying off of the characters. The preview was brief, but it mentioned that the characters would have dozens of fatalities, many of which were more detailed and gruesome than anything seen before. I was hyped.
As the months rolled on, I'd read a few more previews with even more screenshots and fatality descriptions in magazines like PSM. After a while, the previews dried up and I stopped seeing any sign of the game in any publications. Eventually I came across a news piece in EGM where it was revealed that after Thrill Kill had been acquired by Electronic Arts they had decided to cancel the game as it was too violent to fit within their portfolio.
I was pissed, and even a year or so later when the game's engine would be used to create Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style it did little to quell my annoyance with EA for having cancelled such a promising looking game.
Thanks to the miracle of emulation, the beta version of Thrill Kill has been playable for some time now. Having played it myself in its unfinished form, I can't say that it would've changed the world had it actually released. My interest in the game was more for thematic/aesthetic reasons than anything else, but it will always remain the game cancellation that had the greatest impact on me because of how upset I was when I read that it had been cancelled.
Further Reading
Nowadays we have sites like Unseen64 to act as preservation hubs for any and all information that we can drudge up about cancelled, unreleased, or beta versions of games. This is fantastic, IMO, and I really appreciate all the work that the Unseen64 collective has done over the years to preserve these ephemeral games that never came to fruition. They put out some really great video content these days as well, and they recently published a thick tome that physically preserves a metric ton of info on some of the most interesting lost games over the course of gaming history.
So I've always had certain cancelled games that always interested me the most, and I thought I'd pose the question to GAF as well to see what others think and maybe even stumble upon some interesting vaporware that I hadn't heard of before.
When I was young, without a doubt the game cancellation that was the most deeply felt by me at the time was Thrill Kill.
I was a child of the arcades during the early 90's, and I had a particular fondness for the Mortal Kombat series and all of the other violent fighting games that followed in the wake of MK's success. Blood and gore was a novel thing to be in gaming at the time, so I was naturally drawn to violent games. When the PS1 came onto the scene, it differentiated itself from its competitors by building a distinctly darker and edgier library right out the gate with titles like Twisted Metal appealing to an older audience. Being the blood-lover that I was, the very first game that I got with my PS1 in 1996 was Loaded.
Some of the earliest screenshots of Thrill Kill that were circulated to magazines at the time.
I think the first time that I saw mention of Thrill Kill was in an Ultra Game Players magazine, and the screenshots immediately caught my eye with their dark aesthetic and gobs of blood flying off of the characters. The preview was brief, but it mentioned that the characters would have dozens of fatalities, many of which were more detailed and gruesome than anything seen before. I was hyped.
More early screenshots of Thrill Kill.
As the months rolled on, I'd read a few more previews with even more screenshots and fatality descriptions in magazines like PSM. After a while, the previews dried up and I stopped seeing any sign of the game in any publications. Eventually I came across a news piece in EGM where it was revealed that after Thrill Kill had been acquired by Electronic Arts they had decided to cancel the game as it was too violent to fit within their portfolio.
I was pissed, and even a year or so later when the game's engine would be used to create Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style it did little to quell my annoyance with EA for having cancelled such a promising looking game.
EA would later use the Thrill Kill engine to power their four-player fighting game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style.
Thanks to the miracle of emulation, the beta version of Thrill Kill has been playable for some time now. Having played it myself in its unfinished form, I can't say that it would've changed the world had it actually released. My interest in the game was more for thematic/aesthetic reasons than anything else, but it will always remain the game cancellation that had the greatest impact on me because of how upset I was when I read that it had been cancelled.
Further Reading
