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There's no denying that it's a great time to be a gamer. The game library for video game consoles is enormous. PC gaming is going strong even though some people predict its demise. And handheld video gaming continues to thrive. But some games never make it to stores. In fact, some never even make it out of development. In the early days of video games, it was possible for a small team or even a single person to program a game from start to finish. Today, most video games are too sophisticated and complex for a few people to design and program. Instead, video game companies dedicate entire departments to create new games. Companies might go bankrupt or merge with other corporations before a game is finished. Game developers can leave the company in the middle of a project to go work somewhere else. Video game technology sometimes advances significantly during a video game's production cycle, which means the game looks dated before developers have finished making it.
Sometimes developers discover that the game is difficult or even impossible to play. In these cases, companies face a tough decision: Continue developing a flawed game, or cancel the project and concentrate on something else. There are probably hundreds of abandoned games that most of us will never know about. These are the games that companies gave up on before announcing them to the world at large. Only the people who worked on these games -- and anyone they've talked to -- are likely to know about them. There are also dozens of games that companies promoted but that never made it into stores. This article is dedicated to those games and what could have been. What are some of the games that should have given us hours of enjoyment but never got the chance? Keep reading to find out. Sometimes companies will announce when they cancel projects, but other times they'll remain silent about promised products that never emerge.
There's a special term for products that never seem to get out of the development cycle: vaporware. Troika Games. "Arcanum's" mythology combined fantasy creatures like elves and dwarves with steampunk technology. Unfortunately, the company faced financial troubles and dissolved before developers could complete the game. It was supposed to be the third game in the Fallout series, role playing games set in a postapocalyptic environment. Black Isle Studios dissolved before the game was finished. Bethesda Software plans to publish a game in 2008 called "Fallout 3" set in the Fallout universe, though the company designed the new game from scratch. Game publishing company Hip Interactive went out of business in 2005 before the game was finished. The game's developers tried to find an alternative publishing company without success. The game was set in a world inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Gamers would have been able to play this third-person survival horror game on the Xbox, PlayStation 2 or PC.
An Xbox game called "BC" would have given gamers the chance to control a tribe of primitive humans in a prehistoric environment. The player's task was to help the tribe survive in a hostile world inhabited by vicious dinosaurs and other creatures. Lionhead Studios scrapped the game in order to focus on other projects. Game publisher 2K Sports canceled its basketball video game "College Hoops 2k9" when negotiations with Collegiate Licensing Company stalled. Without the licensing agreement, 2K Sports wouldn't be able to use real college team names, logos and players. Rather than publish a game with fictional teams, the company decided to scrap the project. PC game based on White Wolf's tabletop RPG about werewolves. Several video game Web sites hosted videos showing the game's cinematic sequences and ran stories about the game's features. Sadly, the developers canceled the project after the game's mechanics became too complex. Designed with the Xbox and PC systems in mind, Micro Forte's "Citizen Zero" was an online game set on a prison planet.
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