Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 105: Cancelled games

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

Not all games are lucky enough to see a release. Some stew for years in development, only to be cancelled and shoved into storage or, in most cases, discarded entirely. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Dave Rudden, and Chris Antista as the crew examines the most notable games that nearly crossed the finish line.

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Some features are not available in all states. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another great episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and today's episode is all about canceled games. And before I go on with more about this topic, let's see who's with us today. Hey, who's here across from me, as always. It's me, Jeremy Parrish. Very upbeat today, Jeremy. I'm afraid to move.

My shirt's noise. Yes, all of Jeremy's clothes been very... Listen to this. I know. Like, if you hear anything on the audio that sounds weird, it's Jeremy's very noisy clothes. And they're not noisy in terms of how they look. They just make a lot of noise, literally.

It's a very muted shirt in many ways. Yeah, it is. It's very stylish. And who else do we have here today alongside Jeremy, or kitty corner or catty corner to Jeremy, depending on where you're from. I'm Dave Rudden from the Laser Time Network. I know you asked me to be on, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel and leave right now.

Oh, man, we spent so much money in time. But you know what, Dave, I brought everyone to this room today for a reason. I mean, we all went to the Games Press, so we all are familiar with failure and wasted time. And what better way to use our time than to talk about other failures that aren't our own personal ones. And today we're going to be talking about canceled games. To be blunt about this, I could probably do like 30 episodes about canceled games. just looking at lists of cancel games there are literally thousands of them

but for this episode and those are just the ones we know about the ones we know about for sure I mean think about like all the prototypes all the things that were just killed behind the scenes that we don't know about all the half-life threes that were made and then flushed on the toilet I mean

it's crazy but I decided to narrow this down to the most notable ones the ones I thought were most notable and really the ones that were actually previewed reviewed you know covered in some way and then just disappeared so So that's basically what we're going to be talking about today. And we will probably revisit this topic in the future.

And if we don't get any ones that you want us to talk about, leave it in the comments and we might hit it on a future episode. And just to let you guys know, I want to give a shout out to the now dead website Lost Levels for a lot of this research. For about half the games, the Lost Levels wrote a lot of content about these cancel games, and they actually, for some of them, they actually would buy the prototypes to dump them and make them available. So they're the reason you can play BioForce Ape in the comfort of your home.

And so I give thanks to them. Was that ROM released publicly yet? I thought it was. Did Frank not release it publicly? I don't know. We should mention that Frank Sefaldi, who's going to be in our next session, actually. Actually, I should have asked him, but I was way too deep into this before I realized, like, oh, he would be an ideal guest for this. I don't think he'll be offended.

I'm just saying a lot of the credit goes to him and his friends. Now he's made that his mission. Gamehistory. That's right. Yeah, game history.org, which is his new organization, and lost levels is dead for a reason. I mean, they moved on two bigger things, but a lot of that content is still there. Sorry, but a site about canceled games. Right, right, just canceled.

The site itself has been canceled. Oh, the site has been canceled. Yes. Well, what an ironic fate. It's still up. It was not canceled by, it was like a self-imposed cancellation, so maybe it doesn't count. But things like the cutting room floor wiki, unseen 64. These are all really great resources for a lot of these cancel games.

I urge you to go to those and check them out. Lots of great YouTube videos as well that I'll reference. But I do want to start by talking about the California raisins, the grape escape, not the same as the board game, The Grape Escape, which I heard the commercial for 9,000 times as a child. But it is a canceled NES game, which was supposed to be released in 1990. And I'll tell you what, this was covered all over the place in 1990. And in fact, it won the game of the month,

and whatever month it was supposed to come out in Game Players magazine. It was that good, I guess. according to game players. I don't really think so. I mean, I watch videos of this, and it is a five or six level sort of Mega Man clone of sorts, but without any of the hooks of Mega Man, there's no extra great powers you get.

You just throw jam at people, and you look like a walking purple turd, which is what, like, I wish Chris Antista was here. I invited him, and I think he may show up at any point here, but I wanted him to help me explain the California raisins. He canceled. He might have canceled. Geez, oh, man, an ironic fate for me now.

But, yeah, I mean, it's hard to explain the California raisins. To explain this game, you have to explain what the California raisins were, and it is such an 80-specific phenomenon, and Chris does a lot of 80-specific stuff? Does Chris have California Raisins toys in his house, Dave? I would not be surprised if he does. Yeah, like those Hardee's toys, those classic Hardee's California Raisins toys. But, Jeremy, maybe, can I have,

what is your take on the California Raisins as an entity? As an advertising group, as a three-year phenomenon in a, on in America with albums and merchandise. I'm pretty sure I had a California Raisins t-shirt. There were literally four studio albums by the California Raisins. And as a child, I was astounded to know that I heard it through The Great Find was an original song, not sung by Four Raisins. I found that out much later.

I feel like that advertising campaign was inspired by McDonald's Mac Tonight campaign where they also came up with like this anthropomorphic moon playing piano kind of look like Jay Leno, you know, with a big chin. But I think that's been co-opted by Nazis, the Mac Tonight. Oh, God, really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Well, it was Mac the Knife originally. So it was also a classic song.

Right. That was kind of revived and mutilated a little bit in order to do an advertising campaign. Yes. And it was very successful in the sense that people remembered it, but people also kind of forgot that it was for McDonald's. So it was kind of a failure in that sense. But that did sort of inspire, you know, these, this, this, this, trend of like characters promoting things that were also the crash test dummies promoting

you know safety PSAs so the California raisins were very much a part of that trend in advertising and so in this case it was claymation raisins who you know kind of did dance like doo-op and yeah they were motown motown raisins right with I don't think they had names or personalities or they were just raisins and sunglasses they eventually looked different in some ways but it was very odd choice, but it was a phenomenon, and you're right to say claymation because I used to be much more pedantic as a much more insufferable person in my youth. And the only correct use of claymation is when you're referring to Will Vinton's works. Okay. That is a trademarked, a trademark slogan or a trademark term. Anything else is just stop motion, but if it's a Will Vinton

production, it is claymation. And I think the California Raisins were on one of his holiday specials. He has like a Christmas special and Easter special that were run to death. in the 80s. Do you remember any of these, you guys? Nope. Claymation specials. Vagely. Okay, yeah. But the California raisins did feature into them.

I think they were singing around the birth of Christ even. Or maybe that was a Simpsons parody of it. I don't remember. I mean, raisins are a great food for a baby to eat. Yes. I mean, it makes sense, you know, Jesus turned water into wine. Wine is also made of grapes. So he's going to stomp those grapes.

I mean, he was basically like parthenogenesis for the California raisins. Oh, my God. He was like turning water into their flesh and blood. So we've now learned the race. There's some sort of weird, like, you know, transmutation, some sort of religious transformation happening here. Actually, the more I think about it, the weirder this gets. I think we now learn the California raisins are immortal beings that predate Christ. And we should just move on.

They are. So they're like minions. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, wow. They were the minions other day. The California raisins are also, they're, like, emblematic of whenever I think of the 1980s obsession with the 1950s. Oh, for sure.

Like, how so many ads would just be a doo-wop song. Like, they're the ones that I. They probably weren't the first, but they, I think they did it best. All the duop Nickelodeon. The Happy Days. Yeah, so that is the California Raisins. I feel like if you were not, if you were born after 1990, you need someone to sit you down and have the raisin talk because you will not know what these are. But, again, I did way too much research on this. And for studio albums, this game was intended to be released in 1990 when Raisin Mania was frankly over.

The Raisin Trend had dried up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. But yes, the California raisins were invented by, guess what? The California Raisin Board in 1986. It was an insidious plot to get you to eat more raisins. A kind of gross snack as a kid.

I'm not really a fan of raisins. I like golden raisins. Maybe I'm just racist. Those are much better. And maybe, Jeremy. Well, not raisin nets, no. Raisinets are good because they're covered in chocolate. That's the missing ingredient.

It's not good chocolate, though. No, it's milk chocolate. No, milk chocolate is good, but it's not good milk chocolate. It's not good milk chocolate, no. But we've talked too much about the origins of the California raisins. But there's not a lot to this game, which is why I wanted to go into the sourcement It was developed by Radiant Software, and it was, their other games were the Great Waldo Search. Oh, my God.

On N.S. and I think N.S. NES, too. That game is the worst. Yeah, it's like, he's too small to find. There's nothing to it also. Yeah, it's just picking the square and continually like, no, no, no, no. Okay, finally. And it's like Martin Hanford's masterful giant cartoon drawings reduced to a 256 by what, 240 NES screen? 224.

224, yeah, just like, ugh. Nothing looks like Waldo on the screen. But yeah, that sidearms for TG16, which I forget what that is. It's a shooter of some sort. Okay, and Roller Blade Racer for NES, who cares? I don't even know what that is. No one remembers it. No one has any fond memories of it.

It's not the same as Roller Games by Konami, right? No. Roller Games. Ultra. Ultra games. It's much better. It has great, great music, by the way. That's a great soundtrack.

But, yes, so developed by Radian Software, but it was a contract job for interactive of designs, who made some non-notable kind of bad games. Green Dog for the Genesis. It's kind of like a surfer dude who looked like one of those posable art figure models. I don't know what you call those. Do those have a name?

Bendy figures. You've seen them. The Game Gear version of Sonic Spinball and Darkwing Duck and tailspin for TG16. And as a young TG16 owner, I wanted that Darkwing Duck so bad, but no one ever had it in stock. And later learning that it was a terrible game, and I

bought the right one, the Capcom one, I felt much better later. So it was not the same as the Capcom one. Much, much, much different. Yeah. Very sad. So I definitely read previews about this in game magazines. I don't know if you guys recall coverage of the California Raisins game. I read strategy guides, previews, reviews, the whole McGillow.

I do associate it with game players. That just seemed to be like, I don't know what it was, but they loved that game. before they had a desperate need for access to a game, and that was why they picked. That era of game players, I feel, made a lot of strange choices, which is why maybe I enjoyed reading it. It wasn't the ultra-game players. That would be like the edgy 90s, Inside Joke Teen magazine, but it was a much different era for that magazine.

But the goal of this game is to find the four golden notes and rescue the raisins and their instruments. I guess you were one of the raisins, and you're rescuing the other raisins for some reason. but the problem with the raisins again is like no child identifies with a particular raisin. They did not have that brand power where it's like, I'm that raisin because he's the cool one. I'm that raisin because he's good with machines. There's no there's no raisin distinction here. So it's like I don't think there is like, oh, you have to rescue these raisins and you enjoy and love each one of them.

I mean, there's no motivation there for a young raisin fan. I don't know. I don't see the appeal here. Just think of if this franchise had really taken. off, we could have had so many other games based on raisins like act raisin, hell raisin.

I like to act raisin. Act raisin's good. You got to play as God and move around, build it, cultivating the land into vineyards. Drying up great patches. Yeah. Yes. So the one kind of fun thing, it looks just mediocre, not

like a terribly bad game. The one interesting thing is you can push selects and you're raising moonwalks because I guess they did that at some point, you know, Michael Jackson was no longer hip and cool at that point. So, of course, video games would finally make a connection. 1990, was he still cool? I guess a little bit.

Yeah, okay, that was right before. That was between bad and black and white. I think after dangerous, it was bad times for me. Yeah, okay. So he was still timely. But moonwalking was pretty, that was like, he was beyond that. I think I had seen it on Full House by that point. I mean, no longer cool.

It's like one of the Olson Twins was doing it, I'm guessing. Actually, no, that was at the Moonwalker era. So what do I even know? Moonwalker was a 1990 movie. We went over this on a previous episode. Released in Japan first. So I guess this game was actually totally with the times. By stealing that patented dance.

Patent pending. Yes, it's a very generic platformer. The California Raisins The Grape Escape. Again, I think they were kind of inspired by Mega Man. But I don't know how ready for release this was. It seems like it was completed. But it's a very slight game, even for, I mean, especially for 1990. And I tweeted, I retweeted this, this, the ending image, and that's all you get when you beat the game is this one ending image.

And it got maybe 200 retweets because my quote was, are you fucking kidding me? And it was a picture of the California Raisins posing with the caption, congratulations. Which, I mean, that's pretty progressive because at that point, during the NES history, like, people were legitimately spelling congratulations wrong. It was a very hard. We're going to do a Ghostbusters episode today. and I think it's like congratulations. It's like you missed up every L and every R. This is an American developer.

They had no excuse, but I feel like there's no excuse for congratulate raisins. I love dad jokes, but for some reason I just got very mad reading that. If I had to suffer through a California Raisins game, I would definitely be mad if I was created with Congraiser Raisins. You know, So we're going to move on here to BioForce 8, which, so just in studying this game, it unlocked like several memes for me. I didn't understand previously. I don't think I ever looked deep enough into BioForce 8, the butter guy.

We'll get to that, though. It's a very interesting story. I was not in that retro circle at the time. I think they would have hated me because I was a dirty emulation boy. But this game was... They would have liked you. They would have. The whole point of that meme was to promote, like to say, no, emulation is fine.

They're the emulation-friendly group. I forgot about that, so I apologize. So this was developed by SETA, a kind of bad developer who made Kendo Rage. These are just notable to... They made a lot of games, but I think Kendo Rage for the S&ES is probably one of their more notable games. Nosephiratu, a game that was delayed a long time. The Immortal Adai's, which is a Castlevania ripoff. Is that true?

Castlevania Ripoff? Except not a nearly... Yeah, kind of like a bad Castlevania Rupoff. It is to Castlevania with California Raisins as to Mega Man. Is that the one with a guy as a bird? Yeah, okay. The second player can control the bird, but it's really difficult. I see.

Well, you'll be happy to know they fold in 2009. I'm surprised they stayed around that long. On Wikipedia, I couldn't find any like 20th century... Sorry, 21st century games. I'm not sure what they were doing after the NES and S-NES in Genesis era. I don't know. I've covered a little bit of their stuff for Game Boy World, and it's hard to find information.

on them. They did QBillion. Oh, QBillion. Is that one of those Hanyahu Alien games? Or Hanyanko Alien, is that it? Hanyankyo Alien. No, that was by Meldak. Okay, but I thought it was a clone of that. No. It's kind of like a Shanghai puzzle-ish sort of game. Okay, so it's a rip-off of something else in then. Okay. So this was revealed to the public at CES of 1991. These were the years before E3. And the premise is you play as a super-powered Ape, who looks a lot like the Ultimate Warrior. Wow.

A bit like Hulk Hogan. I can't really tell. I mean, he's a very super bronzed, tanned dude, gorilla, or ape, rather. But he does have long, blonde hair and has, like, sort of the arm, the arm tassels, and he's wearing boots. So they were clearly inspired by WWF at the time. So I'm glad you're here, Dave, for this, the BioForce 8 chat. So the Nintendo Power preview says it has the fastest action ever seen on the NES.

And it kind of does, actually. I was skeptical. There's a bit of blast process. thing going on. It's not just for the Genesis anymore. It looks like it moves a bit too fast to be playable, but Nintendo Power did announce the cancellation of

this game in April of 1992, and years later, when the birth of the internet happened in the retro game, circle started growing, they were obsessed with this game, probably based on the name alone, and the premise alone, I'm guessing. That and the fact that, well, okay, it was a number of things. I mean, you know, it was Frank's group

again, and they, you know, obviously thought the name was amusing, but it was the fact that it was a game that appeared to have been completed. Like there were, you know, previews, there was, there was substantial coverage of the game based on, it seemed like, pretty well-developed code. So I think they became obsessed with it because there was the prospect that maybe somewhere out there you could, you could somehow track down this game. Like someone would be able to unearth unreleased ROMs or something.

Yeah, and at that point I think lots of rare prototypes had been discovered, like Earthbound Zero and other things like that. Which, again, was... White whales. Yeah, for sure. But in 2005, someone was pulling a little hoax on the guys at the Forum Digital Press. Someone claimed to have the prototype and posted screenshots that were just basically things he created himself. One of them is of Bioforce Ape farting so hard.

He's destroying the background. It's like peeling off in tiles. And another one happened after... He posted another screenshot after he demanded $2,000 to dump the cart, to turn in the... into a ROM to distribute to the public. Right. And this was them tweaking, like making fun of people who hoard, you know, unreleased games. They get a hold of prototype games that had never been made public, never been seen. Then hold a knife to their throat.

Then basically just like put them away. Yeah. They take this weird perverse pride in locking away a game that no one else has ever played and having exclusive access to it, which does no one any good. I'm erasing this from history. It's all mine. Yeah, so this was making fun of that. It was a, I mean, people fell for it, but I think you're right, it was a satire of...

As more of these cutscene graphics came out and, like, the butter monster starts to say, I am worth 2K money, and someone punches it and says, eat communism. I think at that point, people realized, I think they're just tweaking us. Yeah, that is the screenshot that I had seen before, but didn't really know what it was or what it was referencing. But it is a butter monster, and it's saying, ja, I am made of their butter, and you are worth two K monies and then it's punched by a physicist as e-communism, as Jeremy says, and that helped unlock a lot of things in my brain. I'd seen those images

everywhere. I had no idea. It was a joke about, like, a parody of a bad collector who is holding a game Ransom. A great, I don't know if they found the guy who did it or interviewed him, but that's a great hoax. I think I was fooled by the screenshots. Like, this could come from a bad game. Yeah, I think that was someone

in Frank's Circle. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, we probably should have had him on this episode. Yeah, I apologize. Guys. It's okay. If I had realized, I would have thought, oh, yeah, we should ask Frank. So the final reply of this hoaxer was a smash cartridge. But luckily, five years later in 2010, a prototype appears on Yahoo Japan auctions. And the lost levels, Frank's group, they pull together the money and they buy BioForce 8 for $2,700. So you can pay. It actually was worth 2K monies. Yes. And we don't know if this has been released to the public, I guess, but Frank has a video on YouTube that I watched.

It's a full play-through of what's available of BioForce 8, which is three levels. But this is kind of technically impressive. He moves like Sonic the Hedgehog. He rolls like Sonic the Hedgehog. This is pre-Sonic the Hedgehog, too. I don't know if it was... Was it? I think it might have been...

I just have 1991, so maybe it was in development after or lateral thinking. I don't know. But there are these weird mind cart levels where the sprites sort of scale in their own way, like Sonic Sprites up and downhills and things like that. But he moves really fast. You fight guys and you suplex them And it's the really, really cool and smooth animations when you're doing that It's just a very, very bizarre game

Have you looked into BioForce ape at all, Dave? I'm curious if you knew about the legend Right now I'm just thinking like of an alternate universe Where we're bemoaning the Bioforce ape transition to 3D They lost what made the ape magical And I had seen the name Bioforce Ape a lot like, you know, as a kid And as like a teen online And I always just put it in the same, like, just thought of it in the same, like, B-tier monkey platformers.

Like Toki, Spit, and Congo, Spanky's Quest. Yeah, it's like, well, I mean, it's not Donkey Kong. It's one of the other guys, so why should I care? But, man, I should have. It sounds amazing. Do all these monkey platformers fit into the grand cave mania theory? I think they do, except you're not playing his caveman. Toki definitely does.

Toki does. Spanky's quest, because he's a monkey that turns into a huge. at points, and it's in the Joe and Mac universe? Okay, cool. This is all making sense. I need to make a diagram and make it available online. There's a Joe and Mac universe? There is, except it has two different games today.

Spanky's Quest and Joe and Mac. It sounds like the DC movie universe. Yes, basically. So, yes, that was BioForceApe. Thanks to Frank for doing all that work about 10 years ago to get it out in the public, at least a video of a full playthrough. And I'll put a link to it online. If you're just curious, it is a very interesting-looking game.

It looks kind of unplayable. just with how fast it moves, but they put a lot of work into animating an ape, doing accurate wrestling moves. Like, he suplexes, he spins guys around and throws them, and, like, they're just these weird bee people and tentacle people.

It's a very, very odd, very inspired design on these enemies. I don't know, I get kind of like a low G-man vibe from it, but I don't think it was developed by kid. Yeah, yeah. Just one of those crazy coincidences. I get the same kind of vibe to that, so I know what you're saying.

This is a very obscure comparison. Too damn bad. So we're going to get into some bigger games coming up soon, but I want to cover these smaller NES releases. There's not a lot to say about some of these, but I do want to talk about Sun Man because it is actually one of the first games by Kenji Eno, a now passed away developer.

He's more famous for the things he did at Warp, which is D, D, 2, Enemy Zero. Am I missing anything? Those are the big ones. Yeah, those are the big ones. I'm not a fan of how his games play, but they are just very fun. to watch online. I don't know if I would have the patience to play Enemy Zero,

but I've watched full play-throughs. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so weird, but it looks so painful to play. But yeah, this is basically, there's no background story to this, but they assume that it was going to be a Superman game for very, very, very obvious reasons. Like, it is basically Superman dipped in red paints. And there is a kind of Clark Kentie, you know,

figure in the game that turns into Sunman as well. So, yeah, I don't know what happens. It's probably worth mentioning that it's, Sunman because it was Sunsoft. Sunsoft, that's right. Yeah, it was going to be published by Sunsoft, who did have the DC license, at least for Batman. So those are the pieces people put together as to how this could possibly be a Superman game. They figured, okay, they were probably going to do a Superman game.

It would have been much better than the Superman NES game we talked about on Retronauts Micro, maybe six months ago. That game is awful. Was that a Seda game? That was a KEMCO game. Kempco. Yes. I get those two mixed up a lot. Similarly bad developers.

Doesn't Sunman happen? Kimcoe was okay. They're all right. I had to play Spy versus Spire. Right. That's not even their game either. Sorry, Dave. Doesn't Sun Man, isn't the theme to the game or like what's leaked online?

Like, it's also very similar to the John William Superman. You know what? I don't think I was watching with the sound on, but it's very, it's very, there's a very close connection. And in fact, Sunsoft would release a Genesis game that is very, bears a very strong resemblance to Sunman. In Sunman, all you do is punch and fly. In the Genesis game, you punch fly and shoot laser. beam. So they're very similar. They have similar kinds of stages. Um, and I, I assume Sunsoft maybe had the rights to the design or at least there was not a lot of, I don't know, discussion about

that back then. And they're like, we paid you to make this. We're going to take this and do something else with it. There's also other precedent in Sunsoft having lost a license and gone ahead of the game anyway with Journey to Silius, which was going to be a Terminator game. And they lost the Terminator license, but they were like, the hell with it. We're just going to make Journey to Sillius anyway. And so you have this game that looks so much like fighting through the future world of the Terminator, including all these robots that you have to fight that are basically Terminators. And I think that is actually the best Terminator game to date. Have there been a better Terminator game than Journey to Sillius?

Yeah, I mean, Sunman... T to the arcade game, not good. No, it sucks. I'd rather play Revolution X and that's saying something. Yeah, that game is also garbage. Yeah. So it's a very difficult game, but it's just an interesting little piece of history that this could have been a Superman game. Kenji Eno did work on it. It's a very fully developed game, and I'm pretty sure it's available online.

I watched a video of it. It kind of looks like Batman Return of the Joker, not developed by the same people, but same giant sprites, same very interesting parallax scrolling. EIM made some pretty NES games. Panic Restaurant was one of them. That's also incredibly rare, right, Jeremy? An incredibly rare game. It is a very expensive game, yes.

But I love how that game looks, and it's just a really cartoon, interesting game. We're going to be able to be. So joining us now is Chris Antista fresh off of a breath of the wild induced coma. Sorry, yes. I have not played a game until 5 a.m. In a long time. I would have if I didn't have to get up to record, retroknit. I feel like a giant loser.

I set an alarm with the Apple. The Apple phone, I sound like an old man, we're dead. I'm waking up in front of you guys on a podcast. You like that. Well, yes, Chris, you missed the California Racine's conversation. Oh, it sucks. And I want to know. Venton, Capcom.

Before we move on, what are your... feelings on the California Raisins. I know as an 80s pop culture addict, how do you feel about them? Their short rise to fame, their quick demise, their failed NES game. That's why you're here, Chris. I think they came into prominence right when I was like a kid

learning to pay attention. So all of a sudden these things seeming the music, my parents loved them, they're in Hardee's meals. Was it Ardys? Carl's Juniors? Yeah, every... The Raisinberger? Oh, that's disgusting. Yeah, everybody forgets that they're promoting raisins.

Like, food kids didn't like. And for some reason, after that, kids, every kid had raisins in their lunch. So they did a great job. Yes, the one element of my lunch I threw away. But I'm a big, I'm a big, I'm a big, I'm a big, I'm a big cartoon. You know, I'll say it. Hey, how come he didn't get the pedantic argument?

Well, no, no, he's being right by saying claymation. I'm right, Chris. Yeah, I mean, that's actually with a copyright symbol next to it. We are both huge animation nerds, and you know the difference between claymation and stop animation. Yeah. is one is a Will Vinton Trayton owns Claymation. Is he still alive?

Is he dead? Yeah, he's still alive. He did Claymation Christmas. The California Raisins are in that. And Easter. And Easter. Jimmy Stewart in that. I can't remember.

Maybe. Well, I guess he would have still been alive in the 80s. But this is insane. I don't know why Capcom has had so many games made by commercial pitchman. Wait, so Jimmy Stewart was in a California Raisins movie? He's in a... I think it's Rankin Bass. Okay.

But it's at Easter, but it's worse. It's an Easter bunny. Enjoy your raisins, Bedford Falls. Merry Easter, everyone. Merry Christmas raisin house. Yeah, so that was where Chris's thoughts on the California Raisins. I thought you should know them. It's exactly what you had said that I was reading about it in magazines forever, and it's like no magazine.

It never said, sorry, that game was canceled. We shouldn't have written about it for four months. Yes, exactly. It disappeared and never showed up, and no one missed it. No one cared. No one apologized. It was like a dream. I didn't.

I wasn't sure that it happened. Except that I read old game magazine. Dream that you never wanted to have. Game players assured us we were not all sharing a hallucination. You're talking to a yo-noid fan. I was slightly anticipating this. I'm going to say yo-noid is not a terrible game. It's a terrible game.

It's not a terrible game. It's not a good game, but it's also not. It didn't start out as a Noid game, though. No. We did an episode on that, right? I don't think so. No. I think you did one on licensed characters with no-ed in it.

No, no. We're going to do one on food-based. Yeah. I'm going to steal the idea from Twitter. It's going to happen soon. So, yes. There's a cab-com. Triumvirate there that you're free to take from.

So, we're going to move on and talk about, so these were all kind of slight explorations of cancel games. There's not a lot of info on them. But coming up, we've got some great ones, including the next one, which is Star Fox 2. It was supposed to come out in mid-1995, like Star Fox 1. This was a Nintendo and Argonaut Games co-production. And this was previewed to Hellenback.

I mean, this was going to come out. It was advertised Nintendo Power. Everyone was talking about it. and it was in development for quite some time, almost three years. So as soon as Star Fox 1, development ended, a month passed, and then they got right on the Star Fox too. So they really wanted to do more with Star Fox and make that one of the show pieces, sorry, I guess one of the showcases of what the SNES could do.

But that definitely changed as other systems were releasing, and what the NES could do with a special chip looked nothing like what a PlayStation could do, what a Saturn could do, and that is basically what happened to Star Fox. But we can talk a little bit about why this game came into being, what it was like. And I think Jeremy will be interested in to know that Katsuya Yaguchi, who is basically the creator of Animal Crossing, correct? I guess he passed on the reins. He's his producer now for that. Yeah, I mean, like, Aya Kiyogoku is really more the creative lead on Animal Crossing.

But he's kind of like the god hovering beatifically above, gazing down. He's like the Miyamoto that's haunting. Or like a Buddha in the clouds. He's got a very Budo-like personality. But he was the director of Star Fox 1. He's also the director of Star Fox 2. And Miyamoto's excuse for why they never make the Star Fox games we want is that Star Fox is a test bed for ideas. He has said that many times.

And this was going to be and currently exist as a sort of rogue-like version of Star Fox. And it's even explained like that in the interview by the director. He said, I wanted to make a rogue-like Star Fox. I don't even know if the term Roak Lake was around in 1995, was it? Okay, absolutely. I mean, Roak existed. What was the first Roak like? No, that was the first big one, and that's, you know, early 80s or mid-80s.

Torneco's dungeon or whatever? No, I mean, like on the PC side, you had Rogue Likes going back to the early to mid-80s. Yeah, I wasn't sure. And, yeah, on the console side, you had, actually, I think Dragon Crystal and Fatal Labyrinth for Genesis predate the Torneco games. Obviously, Jeremy knows a lot more about Ruglikes to me. Even though I like them, I like Rogue Lights. Everything they played on GamePro TV, harkening back to an old episode. Yes.

So the gameplay, I don't know if anyone has actually played this. So this game has been available in a semi-almost-finished form online for quite some time. You can download the ROM. You can play through it. Dylan Cuthbert says this is not the actual final version of the game that we worked on. I actually have it. No one may ever see it. I'm like, come on, dude, you need to dump this ROM.

But the gameplay is very different than Star Fox. Basically, you start the game by looking at a map. You choose two characters. I think there are two new ones. One is a poodle, and one is, I forget, but there are at least two new characters in this game. But you basically are looking at a world map, controlling two ships. And as you move your ships, you select points to move them to enemies move. So it is a roguelike in that sense.

And you basically have to intercept ships and missiles before they can hit Cornaria. Oh, my God, I just realized this is kind of irrelevant, but buying a commando is a roguelike. Oh, it is? Because you have the map screen. And when you move on the map, the enemies do too. Yeah, okay, interesting. Man, roguelike stuff is baked into... No wonder I love that game.

I think roguelike stuff, in retrospect, is baked into so many Japanese things. I'm just discovering it's just like... It's in everything. It's like, it's the secret sauce for all these great games. But so, yes, you're on this world map. You're steering ships around, taking out enemies before they can hit Cornaria.

And there are also these planet-based missions where... This was adapted for Star Fox Zero. Other elements of this game were adapted for Star Fox Command. for the DS. They would take the overall structure of StarFox 2 and make it into a portable thing, which I think is not that fun. I love it.

I don't like it, but you're allowed to like it. But the goofy bot sections, I call it the goofy bot. It's this bipedal robot. It also looks goofy in Starfax Zero, which I've only seen and haven't played. How is that, Chris, by the way? Not good. I may borrow it from you one day just to play it.

It'll warm your heart, and then immediately, like, oh, yeah. I just like how puppety everything looks, like as it should. But I think it's like it's a weird precursor to Mario 64 in some ways. Obviously, they were working in different ways in different studios. But these bipedal robot sections, you basically have to, you're in this open field, this square field. And it's like 3D platforming. And you have to hit a switch. And once you hit a switch, you go inside of a base, which is like a little maze.

And you have to find the thing to blow up that base. That wasn't two? That wasn't Star Fox 2. Like when I played this for the first time, I was like, wow, there is not just flying through space. you're actually walking around a 3D environment in a Super Nintendo game, and it should be noted that this is a Super FX2 game,

and the other one's Yoshe's Island. Is there any other ones? I can't remember. I haven't really followed the Super FX line that much. I think it was one of the more rare chips. But I will say that this predates tribes by about four or five years. So that's, yeah, that was kind of like the big thing in tribes was the change in perspective,

which it did before Halo, where you could be... Star Siege. Tribes, right? No, just tribes. Okay. Tribes two. Tribes two fame. I think you have another game?

I don't know, maybe. Okay. But that was kind of the big deal. It was like you could, you know, be a dude running around, killing stuff, and then you could jump into a vehicle and, you know, basically change the scale of the game. And that was a big selling point for Halo, which came out a couple of years after Tribes. So Star Fox 2 kind of way ahead of its time there. Interesting, yeah.

I mean, on hardware that really couldn't do it. No, no. It's interesting. I mean, it would have blown our. minds in 1995. Going back into an emulator, you're like, well, I can see why they killed this because it works. It technically works, but again, the PlayStation was out, the Saturn was out, and they're like, we don't want this to be what people think of when they think of Nintendo 3D graphics. They're not going to get that this is a different system. It's not

going to, it's not going to be what the N64 will be, but this will leave a bad taste in people's mouths. The N64 was just like a tablet add-on for the Super NES, right? It's an accessory. I think consumers are confused, but as they usually are. I mean, the bipedal robot part is one of the worst parts of zero. I couldn't, I I've touched the ROM for this. I just, not with any laser focus. I can't believe they did it as far back as. It's, it's not great, but it is like

while they rendered a really primitive 3D environment on a Super Nintendo that you can walk around in, it's not just like outer space where only objects are coming at you, you're just, you're in, you're in a, like, tangible area, not just in space. I can't speak for a Nintendo, but it always seems like it always seems like Star Fox was a series

like, this is what we should be doing and making games right. Like they never, no one, they didn't really love it. And I guess I don't know, I don't love Star Fox a lot as much as my friends either. Well, I mean, I feel like we've all decided as a society that Star Fox 64 is the ideal form of Star Fox. And it's just

like, can you do that again? And they are always like, no. Yeah, they always say no, because I think it was just like this, we should be making a polygonal flight shooter. Like, how, what's more on Nintendo than that? I think they also realize that they inadvertently invented furries with the original Star Fox. So that's

why they got to have a story in every single one now. Because it's like, well, when is the fox going to kiss the rabbit? Well, yeah. It's got to happen. Once they started giving everyone girlfriends, and once Crystal entered the picture, yeah, yeah, we don't want to go down that road. I'm so glad Nintendo read my fan picture. Why aren't they always kissing?

So Dylan Cuthbert has a quote in something I read, and he says, well, so before I go on to read his quote, the game was apparently 95% complete. Nintendo fully Q and 8 it, ran it through bug testing and everything. And Cuthbert says, the decision was made because they didn't want the old gen 3D going up against the much better 3D of the next generation, side by side. The rivalry between Sony and Nintendo was still very fresh and strong back then because of the whole SNES CD-ROM affair. So, yeah, they were really, I mean, it was like neck and neck.

They were intensely, you know, going against each other, and they didn't want to look bad. And this could have made them look bad in the eyes of some consumers, I think. This was not the first time Nintendo put the cabash on the release of a Dylan Cuthbert 3D game. Oh, what was the other one? X for Game Boy. Oh, you're right. That was going to be released in the USA as moon something. I can't remember exactly what.

But that was a wireframe 3D shooter that had like planet-based, you know, flight missions where you had to do missions. And that came out in Japan. That did come out in Japan. And that is sort of the proto-star Fox game, right? And, yeah, it does feel like a rough draft for Star Fox. It was going to come out here. And I think the delay in localization meant Nintendo said, you know, we could just release Star Fox, day and date, pretty much, with the Japanese version.

And that's going to be a lot more impressive looking. Let's go ahead and do that. On the Game Boy? The original Game Boy? Yeah. I did a video of it. You need to see this. Faceball tech?

Go check out. It's beyond baseball tech. Game Boy World Guidon has an episode on X. Yeah. It's totally beyond baseball. Like, baseball is kind of like... Facebook is impressive on it. It's impressive, but it's still just like kind of the frame rate's not great.

But on X, it's very, very smooth. Yeah, it's really smooth. They're both impressive, but X is more impressive. And, you know, I will, we'll, we'll, We'll talk about X later. But, so again, I think we've discovered they're doing retronauts. Nintendo never throws anything away. They never get rid of an idea forever.

And almost every element of Star Fox 2 was scavenge for future games. So we have things like charge shots, all range mode, and duels, one-on-one duels. Those are all in Star Fox 64. So all of those ideas were taken for Star Fox 64. Everything except the poodle. There's still no poodle. There's still no poodle. I don't know.

Is she in zero? I'm sure there's a Facebook group to vote. to a right now as we speak. Save our poodles.org. And I'm the moderator. Okay. Thanks, Chris. We really need it. Yeah, working at a publisher, I was super

surprised by that, like, why don't we just because I was on the video, I wanted to make a video of all, like, the canceled games that everybody already knew about and had been leaked. And they're like, we can't officially acknowledge these in case we want to bring these mechanics back. We stole people money. I understand that, yeah.

Because you want to bring mechanics back. They were that, like, fierce about protecting potential mechanics, even in games canceled 20 years ago. They wanted the case. ability to do that again and not. There's a lot of weird licenses and patents in that world that I don't know, and I don't know who enforces that.

It's very strange. So what were the three Capcom food games? Were the three is Yo Noid, California Raisins, and what else? Oh, so you're forgetting, World Gone Sour. Sour Patch Kids. Oh, snap. That's a Xbox Live game? It is.

Wow. It's got an official Method Man theme song. I don't know why you're not treating as legitimate. Think out we have that. It's narrated by Creed Breton from the office. It's the biggest star around. I wonder how many units that moved. I'm a fan of Sire Patch Kids I would not even touch that game.

I've never seen it. It's before my time. So, not much more to say about this other than the fact that there is a version of this that was released illegally to the public. People worked on patching in English language. People worked on patching out the debug stuff. It works. Cuthbert says it's not the final version. But I've played it and it's totally playable.

If you're interesting in this weird weird piece of history and Nintendo history, definitely check it out. No one will arrest you. You'll get to look back to 1995 and see what they were doing the most technically impressive SNES game, I think, next to Yoshi's Island

in terms of what they're doing with the chip. I think Yoshi's Island is a much better looking game, obviously, but you will be surprised by what they can do with 3D graphics on an SNES with this game. So the next one is not a super in-depth discussion, but I did want to talk about it because I just played it last year

and immediately regretted my decision and that is the Beavs and Butthead Arcade game, which was produced by Atari Games. I don't know who Atari Games was in 1996. I mean, everyone just like passes the name on. I think they were Midway. Midway, yeah, maybe. That would make sense if they were making...

And I think at that point, Midway was owned by Warner already. Oh, did they own... Did Viacom own them or something? Biacom's a paramount joint. Okay, interesting. But yeah, this was developed by Atari. They planned on releasing infograms at that point out of course. Yeah, maybe.

Well, somebody that was working for a... company named Atari made this game, but... How dare they? Developed by Atari for release in 1996. A year of Beavis and Butthead to Do America. Yeah, and the six months before the show ended in King of the Hill Star Games. So, yeah, but focus groups hated it. This is a weird time for a Beavis and Butthag Game, like you said, Chris, because the movie

just came out and it would come out in late 96, and then the show would end, like, in February of 97 or something. All the games were, like, 93-94. Like, immediately after the phenomenon started. the short-lived phenomenon. But it's weird because, I don't know, I feel weird saying this, but by 96, Beavs and Butthead became a much more sophisticated show than it was in 1993. In 1993, there were no stories.

Like, these dumb characters are going to light themselves on fire. They're going to inhale gas. They're going to do really stupid things. But they got much more imaginative, much more satirical, much more commenting on teens of the 90s, I think. When I read Sartre, I really like to eat some camemberar. No exit? I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, and this game is really oddly, looks like those really early, early beaves-and-butthead cartoons.

Like, things are taken right from that, like them, them holding bats with punching, sorry, punching gloves at the end, wearing bikinis. It's from a very, very early Beavis and Butthead short. They were not doing this stuff in 96, and the game is this very ugly. It reminds me of the G.I. Joe Arcade game. It's not quite as stiff, but you're moving into the screen. and everything you're fighting and everything around you looks nothing like

anything in the Beavis and Butthead world like nothing that was ever drawn by Mike Judge And there's no like giant Daria out of fight There's no giant Daria Yeah what's that? No Milton's. No Milton's no Well there is Mr. Buzzcutt

Who's the guy at the high score screen But you don't fight Mr. Anderson Unfortunately What? Yes exactly He's Hank Hill's real dead I think I think Cotton Hill stole Hank for Mr. Anderson

It's all part of my head cannon But this is the only arcade game with a cool button and a kick-ass button in case you're wondering the two buttons. But it's just ugly. I don't think they had all the voice clips in it because they're really, really repetitive. And the conceit is that Beavis and Butthead are watching different shows and get sucked into them. But they're just very generic ideas. Like they get sucked into like this level where you beat up hippies. They get sucked into like a carnival level.

They get sucked into an Old West level. It's just like these are not Beavis and Butth. style activities. Isn't that the same premise as the Super NES game, virtual stupidity? No, that's the PC adventure game. Oh.

Yeah, and that's actually... What was the Super NES one? Virtual BART. Virtual BART. Oh, I'm getting my... My 90s and Furnaby. Beavs and Butthead and for the S&ES are just called Beavis and Butte, it's a bad platform.

You go to places in Highland and you do Beaves and Butthead things. Which for some reason, my parents wouldn't buy me the game, but bought me the strategy guide. And my mother, for my birthday, because she hates me, sent it to me last year. Thanks, Mom. We're still not getting this game, Chris. No, I will go to back for Bertus Cipity. I want you to download the ROM.

This arcade game never could have worked. It had... But if it would have come out when it should have come out during the height of the popularity of the show, they would have been protests everywhere. I think there would have been too much for society to bear. I don't think there's any room in a 1996 arcade for Beavis and Butthead. There's so many great fighting games at that point.

Weren't arcades sort of dying in 96? Yeah. But not yet dead. Okay. I know my local arcade. were all dead by 97. I mean, elevator action 2

had just come out so that was actually pretty much the height of the American arcade. That was the Street Fighter 2 of its day, I think. Finding them six more months. But I can't imagine

at this stage there weren't any platformer punching. It was all 3D fighter fightery stuff. I mean, this is just a brawler but a bad one and it looks ugly.

I feel like it would have to be, I mean, it is bad enough to be canceled based on focus groups. And this game, there are maybe like 12, prototypes in existence, and it was at the Midwest Gaming Classic, and we will be there. Hopefully you'll hear this before them, but we'll be there this year.

That Milwaukee one? It's a Milwaukee, right? Oh, man. It's Milwaukee, correct? Yeah. And I played it there, and I immediately walked away, and I washed my hands because that's what you do. Oh, I remember that was when you were weeping softly to yourself. Yes.

And I love Beavis, I still love Beavis and I think they're great. It holds up way better than you would have. Yeah, but only one, maybe one and a half of their games are good. This is not one of them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. We're going to be able to be. Here I'm walking through a field, and I'm thinking about a girl just a few years younger than me that was stabbed to death. There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America, and each one is called a cold case. She said, I think my dad could be responsible. I think he killed them.

These are some of those rare cases. Cold case files the podcast. Don't miss a moment. Subscribe now on the Podcast One app, Apple Podcasts, or at podcast.com. And don't forget to watch your DVR Cold Case Files the TV show every Thursday at 10 on A&E. Are you ready to achieve the millennial dream? Are you ready to be able to afford both avocado toast and a home mortgage? Then you definitely need to make certain you're being paid fairly for your professional skills and experience

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Believe it, Geico could save you 15% or more on car insurance. So we're back, and I'm going to talk about what everyone loves for me to talk about is Sonic the Hedgehog. Me talking about Sonic the Hedgehog has never gone wrong. And anyway, I never hear people yelling at me for saying the wrong things about on Sonic, but...

Are you mean to Sonic or inaccurate? I think I'm too accurate. People don't like it. I'm sorry. We're going to go to the phone now. Yes. Oh, no. The board's lighting up.

Hello, this is Chili Dogs 420. I don't like to what you're talking about. I'm fired. Oh, no. Okay, so this is Sonic Extreme. Okay, going into this research, I spent an entire morning reading about this game, watching videos about the development. I assumed it was like, oh, you know, they were going to make it,

and they did it, and it's over. Oh, no, oh, no, brother. This is a very, very, very complex story. But to explain this point in time, Sega needed a Sonic game. 1993, as we have discovered through past episodes, was the biggest year for Sonic. In Sonic 3, all of these Sonic games, the cartoons, everything was happening in 93. We would not see another real Sonic game for a while. 94 was Sonic and Knuckles.

And a 3D Sonic game was the logical conclusion, the logical next step. rather, in the Sonic series. Everything was moving to 3D. The 3D platformer wars were heating up with Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, and even Sega of Japan's own knights. Thank you. I have to. I mean, it's part of the story. But before we continue, I do want to play a video.

This is a promotional video that Sega sent out. And all of these videos from this era are extremely catty. They're just giant companies taking pot shots at each other. And there's a lot of hubris packed behind this video, but it starts with, there's no audio, so I'll tell you how it starts, at least in this part. It starts with a meeting of the International Plummer's Union

in Palermo, Italy, and it is Luigi smoking a cigar, talking to Mario about how they're in big trouble, and it is interrupted by footage of Sonic with rock and music and some words, but I'll tell you what the words are. I'll just play this clip for you. What do you mean you couldn't catch him?

Guys fast at lightning, boss? He just disappeared in the Blue Street. He's running really fast. He's running. You idiot. You should have set a trap. Boss, he blasted right through it. More footage.

I'm telling you, he's bigger and badder than before. Sonic Extreme. And it's a lot of footage and a lot of words on this right now. But at some point, the words... Because his marketing is top notch. At some point, it does say Mario Who? During the thing. And if you remember...

It's Mario 64. It's one of the greatest games of all time. Exactly, David. Just like, how dare you, sir? You've impugned one of the greatest. games of all time with your unreleased trash. But how can Sonic run so fast when he's also playing double kick drums? That's music. He's

that good. He can coexist in two places at once, playing kick drums and running at the same time. This is the most 90s. That happened all the time. Yeah, that was Sega's marketing. It was... Electric guitar than, like, teacher character. What are you playing a Genesis

pusho? It's not for adults. So, okay, I have to get into this. It's very complicated. Stay with me. you can, but Sega needed a hit. Sega needed a hit so bad for the Saturn. Chris, it was telling me he has Saturn-Stocklems syndrome from being a Saturn owner. What's that like, Chris? Are you still dealing

with it? I remember making the decision. It's a beautiful story about my mother, going out of her way to get me the N-64 I wanted because she had a friend at Montgomery Ward. Set it aside for me, and then Saturn launched its marketing campaign. You'll get Virtual Cop, Daytona, USA, and

Virtual Fighter 2 for free by buying the Saturday. That was a true desperation move. Like, Sega's three big games for the console. It was $80 for Mario 64, and I didn't have a job. I was a little kid, and I'm like, I got to go with the Saturn. And that's the one I had to stick with for basically a year. So I was rooting for the Saturn. I was sitting through Bug and Brain Dead 13, like, this is great.

This is awesome. Were you on the hook for Bug 2? What's he going to do now? I have both of those games still. And Knights was that one redeeming thing. Like, this is, it's short, it's got its flaws, but it's like, I've never seen anything like this before. And you couldn't have done it on the old console. So I could see in hindsight it could lose the three-way console

or with Bandicoot and 6, Mario 64, but I loved it. And this was the game, it reminds me a lot of the Wii U, actually. Oh, how so? Because whether the Wii U needed a big Mario game or a big Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, and while we were told it was going to happen, it never really did. And by the time Breath of the Wild did happen, the big hype is for the Switch version. Breath of the Wild is the dirt on top of the Wii U's coffee, basically. It's as if they canceled Breath of the Wild.

That's the only analogy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is the Krusty is coming from Camp Krusty of the Saturn, of this era. We were looking to Sonic to something to redeem the system and have bragging rights. And instead of getting it on the next console, just never happened. Which is weird because, like, a lot of things started in Sonic's, the cartoon has characters that are only in Sonic Extreme, the prototype. So this is very complicated. I'll try to explain this as best I can, and it's going to get super deep.

It was supposed to be a big deal. Like, there were characters in the comics and stuff like that. It was originally tied into the cartoon. So here's what happened. So as we talked about in our Sonic episode, please look it up. Lots of people liked it. A few people didn't, but I'm sure they're okay now. So basically to make Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles and Sonic 2,

half of Sonic team or a lot of Japanese staffers of Sega flew to America to work side-by-side with Sega Technical Institute. It's a co-production between American and Japanese developers. Before Sonic Extreme started, all of the Japanese developers went back home. presumably to work on other Saturn projects I'm guessing a lot of them did work on nights which was going to be the big holiday 96 game for the Saturn but this was supposed to be that too

so there were several pitches and three of them are known of and there are some videos of these online one of them is incredibly bizarre I only learned about these recently one was called Sonic 16 and it was originally based on the look of the Saturday morning cartoon it has very big sprites

more animations and it has a it has a sort of perspective of of a brawler where you sort of have like a sort of play style staging where there's like a little bit of a little bit of depth of the backgrounds but in the videos online it is basically Sonic being solid snake like slipping behind

barriers like throwing rings at guards while their backs are turned like and I and I think this chilly dogs and I think this focus on really big sprites and really extravagant animations was probably a reaction to how much of a success Aladdin was for the Genesis

and things like Earthworm Jim really looking like really beautiful cartoon art on your screen. But, I mean, the important question is, with the power of the Saturn, would they include Jaliel White? He's too expensive, I think. So, yeah, that was the one thing that was shot down. There was an untitled, isometric game proposal that eventually became 3D blast,

which we'll talk about soon. It's one of the worst thing that's ever happened. It's secretly a flicky game. It's a flicky game. Yeah, it's the flicky sequel you didn't know you didn't want. And Sonic Mars, which this was, okay, so the 32X was Sega of a America's console. It was their mistake.

They were going to make this next Sonic game for the 32X, and it was going to be called Sonic Mars. And there's a video of this online. It looks kind of like Sonic Extreme in a way, but it's more like StarFox-style flat-shaded characters. Sonic going across these platforms floating in space. Very simple polygons. UJNaka was like, yeah, good luck with that, basically.

He was just like, okay, whatever, America, I'm going to go make nights the greatest game of all time. You have fun. Thank you for referring to it as such. And the 32X got knuckles chaotic, so it all... Oh, yeah. That is one of the greatest games of all time, like Mario 64. So it's getting complicated.

So they're like, the 32X is dead. We are going to start development for Sega's next system. They start doing that. Then Sega alters that system drastically to become the Saturn. They have to restart development again. So restarting development is going to be a common theme throughout the Sonic Extreme tale of tragedy and misery. So we already have like two false starts. And they need to get this game out.

They need to make a new Sonic game. We're going to see so many years without a true Sonic game. What is, like, between Sonic and Knuckles and Sonic Adventure, I think, like, five years, there was no Sonic game over five years. I think you're overlooking Sonic for. No. Sonic for Sonic 4? Oh, I totally forgot his name, but Sonic Crackers? No, for NeoGeopocket Color.

Oh, Sonic Pocket Adventure. Yes, that's it. Oh, that's not real. Jeremy just frowned at me I'm sinking back again Jeremy frowned at me again So that was a crestfallen look He's disappointed in me

So So a jam had some 3D sonic jam in it It did have that That like framing sequence I am right back to arguing this to my friends There's some 3D Sonic elements If you can unlock it We'll get the Sonic Jam

That's the like epiloc to this tragic tale So one year into development of the Sonic Mars project 32X project canceled Sega 32-bit system canceled. Sega Saturn goes in development. A year into development, the director quits. A new director joins the group,

and development splits into a lot of different teams, which is the main problem throughout this development thing. A lot of miscommunications. This is like in the early days of the internet, the early days of no one had slack or anything like that. No one had these tools that we use every day in our lives to communicate with each other. Uh-oh.

Problems with Sonic Extreme. Uh-oh. Oh, God. That's the first thing. time ICQ has been referenced in, um, I'm going to say eight years at least. And, uh, yeah. So if you want to know what that is, ask your parents. So, uh, to make up the story of Sonic Extreme, uh, six to seven different stories are pitched. And I watched an entire like 45 minute video about these six or seven different Sonic stories. And I won't go into any of them in great

detail. But they eventually left a Saturday morning cartoon behind because it would soon be a thing of the past. Like, they only made two seasons of it. And by 95 or by 96, it would be over. Um, So they develop a new kind of universe, and there is a new character, a new love interest for Sonic named Tiara Bubowski. Boobowski. Boo, Bowsky. The word booboob is in her name. Wow. Yes.

Was Sonic doing Conquer before Conquer did Conquer? I don't know. This feels like a thing like a British developer would do, like a cheeky, like, booburnace in a character name. But I don't know what they were thinking with Tiara Boobowski. I mean, I was playing, I was playing ukulele. the demo. And there is a snake named trouser. So,

I mean, you feel like, yeah, I mean, it's funny that they work in a puppy named sweater. Oh, God. I'm sure I'm sure they would go that far if they were, if they were that clubbakers. I'm not sure if they are, but I'm looking forward to that game. So this is what eventually would become Sonic Extreme, I think. So

this game would use 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds and a fish eye lens, which the video I played audio of called it the reflex lens. So it basically looks like a Puff Daddy video from the 90s when you're playing it. Yes. Sonic should be like going into the screen, throwing money at the camera, things like that. It never happens, though.

So this is going to have a very ambitious design at first. They were really biting off a way more than they could chew. They were going to be three playable characters, one of them being the boob lady. I think her gimmick was she would jump into other worlds in the background. Tails' thing was, it would be a behind-the-camera level where he's flying through things. And Knuckles was an overhead, like, maze game. I don't know what they were thinking with this. They were getting far away from what people want from Sonic.

But this was kind of the prequel to Sonic Adventure. Yes, exactly. Like, too many cooks, too many ideas. We should just stick with what people like. Sally Acorn. So that's Chris's one true pairing. Sonic. Wait, is it you and Sally or is Sonic and Sally?

What a ship. All together, polyamorous, A. Sally Acorn. We're all married. And Nichols is our butler. So this is already getting super complicated, but they bring in another developer named Point of View to essentially remake the engine. And what happened was there are all these different teams. And one day, President Nakayama visits the teams in March of 96 to see the game. And they all have different versions of the game.

They're working on. So Team A has a bad version of the main game engine. Team C has a much better one. Unfortunately, Nakiyama sees Team A's version and has a fucking, like, heart attack. And it's like this, it's running at single frames per second. How is this going to get done before the holiday season? How is this going to even happen? And then he sees the code from Team B, which is the 32x code used for the boss fights.

And development starts again using that code. So all of the footage from Sonic Extreme that you see, that is that Fish Eye Lent stuff, is the Team C code with the 2D characters on a 3D background. So you're seeing a canceled game in action. The final version of the game, I think, would eventually become the bonus level in Sonic Jam, where you get that weird prototype of Green Hill Zone. I don't know how you unlock it.

Is it hard to unlock or is it open? It's not immediate, but you can't do much of it other than navigate a menu. Yeah. So the final version of the game was similar to that. And they really need help. STI really needs help. And this is where it gets kind of,

we see a lot of the infighting between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. They're like, oh, Yuji Naka's got this thing called Nights, and he's working on it. And we're going to just use his code because we're all at Sega. That's cool, right? Apparently it's not, and he gets really mad and threatens to leave the company, as he did many times in the past, as we've heard on the Sonic episode, unless he gets his code back and gets to work on Knights in his own time.

And whatever they did with the Knights Engine had to be thrown away again. So this is like eight false starts on Sonic Extreme. And it hasn't been confirmed that they did this. One report says Naka was mad because Extreme looked too much like Nights. It wasn't that they were using his code. So they're conflicting stories. But in any case, Naka got mad that Sonic was looking too much like Nights. And I feel like Naka always wanted to move away from Sonic after one because he wanted to be in complete control.

And bringing in American teams a sort of adulterate his, his and his team's vision was not what he wanted to do. There was a sort of pride in making his own thing. And that's what Nights would be along with other things he would. would work on in the future. But, again, the final, final version was more 3D, looked like Sonic Jam, and what the replacement was, was a quick port of Sonic 3D Blast for the Saturn. I mean, okay, number one, bad game, number two, really good soundtrack. I got to say, it's got a great soundtrack for such a bad game, but...

I mean, that makes me feel like I was held hostage, because I was playing that holiday season. Oh, no, Chris. This is fine. I'm collecting flikies, and it's what I always wanted. Yeah, so... Sonic is slow, and you rescue us. And to put a bow on this story, so promotions were already in place for this, one of which was the Sonic Christmas special from 96 that we watched for an episode of Retronauts, I think it's a Retronauts micro from around Christmas time, or I think it's our holiday special of 2015, so look that up. Basically, it was going to be a tie-in to the game.

They resurrected the Sonic Cartoony series three years after it had a 65-episode run, and it was, God, it was originally called, an extremely Sonic Christmas. They changed the title to Sonic Christmas Blast. But in the cartoon, he still says have an extremely good Christmas kids,

because I'm going to be in your stocking. Oh, yeah. But actually... Waited a year and called it Sonic Holiday Jam. Sonic's holiday disaster. But yes, any questions class

on this very complicated story of Sonnet? I mean, can you believe the utter failure that was involved? It's just a stat. Like, I feel bad for everyone involved. Like, watching these videos, I did not go into as much details I could have, but, like, people were almost dying working on this game.

People were moving the project because they had to be hospitalized. It was, like, all hands-on-deck, kill-yourself mode to make this game. I think they, like, saw Sega felt the pressure of, like, 1996. Yeah. I remember, like, reading game players, and it was, like, this is, everyone's bringing their biggest gun. You know, PlayStation has Crash Bandicoot. Nintendo has Super Mario 64, and, you know, the Saturn has to have Sonic.

They eventually, like, kind of just, you know, put in the Knights and, you know, was a way better, I think, decision to do that than, you know, 3D blast. Yeah, no one even paid attention when that came out. I mean, it was on every Sega console, of which there were too many. Yeah, Game Gear, Pico, I don't know. Maybe 32X. I can't remember, but they were, like, you were playing a glorified Genesis port. Yeah.

It's your biggest exclusive of the holidays. Yeah, it does not look that good. And I think in any case, this could. not have been a good game. It definitely could not have competed against Mario 64. Again, that is unfair to make anyone, to ask anyone to compete against a game that would change the way games

are designed forever. Have you read the story behind the bubsy 3D guys who were like... Oh, yeah, I think so. Tell the story, Chris. They were just working valiantly to define what a 3D platformer could look like, and then I think it's at CES, see Mario 64. I'm like, oh. God!

What? But they were doing the right thing. No one had done this before, but Nintendo refined it so well right out the gate. Actually, we have the best people making the thing that you wanted to make and we'd be it better than you, sorry. I think only Rare has come close to Mario 64 in that kind of gameplay.

Yeah, for sure, yeah. And that was post-Mario. I'm not a big fan of that game, but you can't ignore that that game did launch Sonic fandom to what you see on the internet. Most of those people are Sonic Adventure fans. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they all grew up with it. And I did admit some details because

the journey of Sonic Extreme could be an entire retronauts. I watched like an hour's worth of videos about this, but there's so much stuff I didn't know. I will include links to these videos like Sonic 16, Sonic Mars, all these Sonic Extreme footage, screenshots, things like that.

There are a lot of bad business decisions in there that you couldn't see, given how young the medium was, that like normally you do have to come up with a concepts you know that can work and see it through, even if it comes out to be a six or a seven game. This doesn't happen anymore where like eight, nine concepts are revealed to the public.

development was much cheaper, but also there was a lot more at stake, especially now. It was basically do-or-die time, but you're right, Chris. I don't think this could have happened now. Sonic boom. Not a great game. Disappointed a lot of people, but it has to come out. Yeah, they still went and made their bad game instead of rethinking at night times, for sure. So that wouldn't happen.

It is odd to think about five years with no Sonic game, but I guess it did happen. I'm sorry, Sonic fans, but that was a story of Sonic Extreme. I don't know. Oh! Oh! So, the other, and I'm nother, uh,

yeah, but I'm a lot of it. And so, I'm a... We're not... I'm... And... I...

...theon-a-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-ha... ...a... ...to... ...and... ...that... ...and... ...and... ...and...

So next we're moving on to something Jeremy might want to talk about. It is Robotech Crystal Dreams made by the legendary developer Game Tech, mostly known for Jeopardy Jr. Double Dare. What's that? Double Dare. Yeah, all of the bad, I think they just published rare versions of that. But this was them getting into development or maybe trying to do some more development.

And in a hilarious move, Game Tech was a member of the N64, quote-unquote, dream team. Jeremy, can you tell me more about the dream team and how they're actually the nightmare squad? Well, in the 1990s, third parties started to say, you know what, Nintendo not treating us so well. They're making us pay a lot of money up front to make our games. And the burden sits entirely on our shoulders. And you had publishers like Capcom produce a lot of games for Super NES, expecting, you know, great sales. And suddenly those sales didn't materialize and there was all this unsold inventory and Capcom

had already paid the money to produce the games so Nintendo made their profits and Capcom ate the pain so a lot of people were moving away from Nintendo's orbit and when Nintendo announced the N64 the Ultra 64 they were like

well look we've got third party developers yes Sony has some and Sega but look we've got game tech and we've got who even else like a claim and Acclaim was one of the biggest Well, Iguana was a studio

that worked for acclaim. They made to rock. But basically, no one you care about. There was a lot of like, huh? It was a marketing thing on the U.S. side because none of those companies were Japanese. There were lots of Japanese developers supporting N64, at least at first.

But, yeah, this was on the American side, Nintendo of America, saying, look, we've got all these great developers that you love. of, like, game tech. And this was an adaptation of Robotech, a, I would like Jeremy to explain this as well. I know it, but I think you probably, did you watch this growing up? Did you watch Robotech?

I saw it. It was before my time. I saw an episode of Robotech. I would have assumed. Because it wasn't, it wasn't broadcast where I lived. Okay, it was a syndicated program. And one afternoon at my grandparents' house, you know, on the other side of the country, I happened to turn on TV, and there was this crazy looking cartoon.

It was like a soap opera. and there was an alien invasion from space and the episode I saw there was a pilot and his girlfriend got stuck in like part of a ship where a spaceship where no one ever went and they were marooned in there and they had to catch a fish

that was floating past the airlock. Anyway, it's a great episode of Robotech but I didn't know what it was but it caught my imagination and that was when I became an anime fan which I didn't realize until I finally saw anime like I don't know 10 years later. Robotech was

Yeah, like, what was the animated series? Yeah, yeah. It's complicated. I'm not sure if anyone actually remembers Robotech. There were three anime series that came out in Japan that had a very similar sort of worldview and mecca style, robot style. Were they all Macross? No, there was Superdivision Fortress Macross. Ah.

There was Genesis Clymer Mospeda and I can't remember what it was called, but it was like Southern Cross. Southern Cross. That was to make the movie. Yeah. So, Southern Cross was the second. arc. So basically Harmony Gold at an American company licensed all these

anime series together and a guy named Carl Masek basically performed surgery and said how can we take these three shows and make them a single show? So Matt Cross became the first half of something called Robotech and then Southern Cross took place

it became like the second arc the Invit arc or the master's arc of the Robotech saga like 20 years after the original Macross saga. And then the third part was the Invid saga in which the aliens who were secretly behind everything that had happened before

had to be chased off the planet Earth. And so these three series were completely unrelated. They just had kind of like a similar animation style and similar mech design aesthetic. And they were mashed into one series called Robotech that didn't quite match up the way I think they intended. But it was a good try. And it was the only way to get these animations.

into syndication because none of them were quite long enough to be sold as a syndification package, which I think had to be 100 episodes? Yeah. I think it maybe was like 65 episodes, but basically they had to get enough episodes together. So they packaged these together, rewrote the scripts, changed up

the, totally changed up the names and the plot line for the Southern Cross and for Mospeda. And that was Robotech. So there's all kinds of crazy licensing shenanigans. Like Harmony Gold still owns a bunch of the design and stuff.

I know they re-released the actual Robotech episodes as they were edited like in the early 2000s. I would see them at like GameStop and stuff. More recently than that, actually. I have a DVD set that I picked up like five years ago.

Okay. So they still make them? They do. Because I caught a bunch of it, just never ordered. Harmony Gold still has this, you know, the rights to these things and they guard it jealously and they keep like doing little things with it so that they can maintain the rights.

I'm shocked they still exist. I mean, they're existing entirely on Robotech, I'm pretty sure. They've tried making, you know, American exclusive sequels The Sentinels was meant to be like a Oh, really? Like a shorter continuation of Robotech. But anyway, so basically that's the Robotech's the movie. Yeah, so this game was based on Robotech, not Macross.

Oh, okay. Right. But Robotech is part Macross. Robotech is Macross and Southern Cross and a more thing. Right, right. It's very complicated, but but this, the game was very much about the American Robotech game. Yeah. This was very much based on the Macross portion of the TV series. Okay. Is that the one that kept going, like, that is technically the phenomenon in Japan?

Yeah, Macross, like, there's been Macross Plus, Macross Zero, Macross Part 2, Macross 7. We have no super Southern Cross Kai happening right now. And I think it is kind of famous for, like, what is the plot line where the woman sings a pop song to kill the aliens or whatever? Protoculture. Protoculture is a thing that the Zentrotti, the genetically engineered giant aliens who have been bred exclusively for war. When they're exposed to protoculture, which is basically human emotion and, you know, that sort of thing, they begin to feel these strange stirrings and they all fall in love with this pop singer named Lynn Minmay who sings and basically seduces big chunks of the Zentradi over to side with the humans because she makes them feel things in their hearts. Weakness was love. They know they can experience that.

Well, let's talk about the game. It was going to come out in 97, I guess. Game Tech was really budding off more than they could chew, which is a common theme in this episode. But it started as a basically a space combat game, but moving on to something, like, more ambitious than Mass Effect. They wanted to recreate the entire solar system that would take months to travel to and travel through in real time. A Blaskor did it. Yeah, kind of. Is that like across the United States in Blascore or whatever?

It's across the universe. In real time. Oh, in real time. Technically real time. Thank you, rare. So this sounds a lot like No Man Sky, which everybody loves. Oh, yeah, there was no blowback to that, but this didn't come out. That did.

Was there actually anything produced to this game? Because all I ever saw of it were like the same two screenshots, which contained basically like a cockpit view of space and then twos and trotty battle pods, which were the same asset, like flipped in reverse and scaled to a different size. There are two videos I found online, but the thing about this game is, uh, Game Tech had basically, they were a tiny company. They had three programmers, is what I read, and not any experience developing 3D games, but they wanted the entire game to be rendered in three dimensions. Like in 64 games, you would see sprites doing a lot of the lifting for 3D objects. Like, oh, this Chompchomp is actually a flat spriter, this Bambom rather.

So they didn't want to do that. This game basically made Game Tech bankrupt, and it was one of the more... All three of them? Probably all three guys had to hit the road with their bindles. But, yeah, this game, I remember being one of the more infamous of the canceled games of that era. Maybe it was a little too early for Robotech nostalgia. Again, I didn't start seeing this come back until the early 2000s, and now we can never escape 80s nostalgia.

It's just going to be here forever. But that was basically Robitech. Any other thing on this game, you guys want to talk about? What we have available is very slight, and it just was way too ambitious for what they had to work with. I didn't realize there was that much created for the game. I thought it just got to the screenshot mock-up stage. Well, they did work for three years on it, so some stuff came out. Okay.

But at the same time, in Japan, PlayStation fans got a game called Macross VFX, which was based on Macross, not Robotech, and was, from what I've heard, very good. And I think they eventually made a Robotech PS2 game, maybe 2002 or something. There was. Greg Stewart worked on that. Oh, really? Isn't there a PS3 launch game for Robotech? I don't believe so. I don't recall one being after.

Dynasty Warriors. Gundotech? I think you're thinking of Gundam. My bad. I'm in a Gundam. Gundam. I'm going to Gundam. What? Steve Warriors, Robote.

I love anime cartoons. You've insulted me as an anime fan, Chris. Don't ask me. I'm not allowed to talk about anime on laser time, apparently. Animation was a mistake. So let's move on. We've got a few more games to cover, and I'm glad we're covering these in detail. I find it bizarre that we look at my 80s nostalgia.

There was a war, and Game Tech and Robotech fought, and one of them was vanquished. Robotech still lives on. It's so crazy to think that they, that's, ah, keep going, I'm sorry. What doesn't live on. I believe those were called the Tech War. The Tech Wars. William Schatner chronicled it for us. Well, as Ghost Writer did. But what didn't go on was Warcraft Adventuresurs.

Third party clan, I didn't expect coming in. The kids got to know about Tech War sooner later. But I want to talk about Warcraft Adventures guys. Lord of the Clan, it was going to be a point-and-click adventure game released in 1998. And I'll tell you what, they got the help of the guys at Animation Magic who made those classic CDI Zelda cutscenes. to be all known and love. So Dr. Katz? They're sub-doctor cats.

Dr. Katz had the lack of confidence to not move things that they should have had, frankly. But this received so much coverage. I was reading PC magazines at the time because you always get a cool demo disc. And they were like, this game's coming out. Here's a preview. Here's an interview. It was, frankly, almost released. And I think this was definitely proof to the huge popularity slash shouldn't be irrelevancy of PC adventure games.

A lot of things became adventure games. that never would have. Like, there is a Duckman adventure game. There is a Beavis and Butthead adventure game. Are you clicking at? Is there a King of the Hell of Adventure game? It might just be like a Virtual Springfield type of game. There should be.

There should be a Simpsons one too, but there's not. But things were turning into adventure games as they were kind of falling from Grace. And as Ron Gilbert explained, adventure games didn't really sell less. Other things were just selling more. And I think he said Doom killed adventure games. Like, Doom was the experience people wanted on their PC. Not the cartoon comedy point-and-click stuff anymore. After they saw Doom, that was over for them.

So they were always trying to catch up with Doom but never could. But, yeah, this is mostly complete but never released. It would... Did it just get released? It was leaked in September of 2016. Yeah, so I saw the opening, which is gorgeous and fun. It looks okay. And a full video of this came out in 2010, but the game was leaked by a Russian developer in 2016,

because I'm guessing a lot of animation. He probably found it in the DNC email. Oh, God, no. I did it to destabilize hairstone. I like that. That was good. I almost sneezing the mind. So it's important to note that, I don't know if we remember this, but Warcraft was just a goofy-ass game.

It was just these goofy-ass stereotypes. It was not meant to be taken very seriously. Warcraft 3 would be the thing that would make the game more serious. There would always be comedy in Warcraft, but Warcraft 3 would lead to wow, which would really establish, no, like, here is all the lore. and here's the epic adventure. Nobody smiles. Yes, exactly.

Everyone's very mad about orcs. And, yeah, so they really got off on the wrong foot, of course. They employed the help of animation magic. Not a great developer. Their work on this game is much better than their work on the Zelda CDI games, which I cannot excuse it anyway. But I'm glad they did it because people have made so much fun out of those bad videos. It's great.

So at some point during development, Blizzard brought in Steve Muretsky, who was a guy behind the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, probably not a guy you want to bring in to make a moderate adventure game. I mean, I don't know if anyone's played. Have you played that game, Jeremy, Hitchhiker's Guide, text adventure? I have. It is, like, intentionally mean to you, like, a lot of those games at the time. It doesn't try to fuck with you in many ways that game.

In what sense? Just like, it has the painful nature of an adventure game, but with the uneven logic of a Douglas Adams novel. so it's just very hard to navigate. Well, you do have it at some point you need to use no T. The game comes with no T. It's one of the feelys.

There's no T. It's just a lack of T. How does that work? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. But they bring him in. Apparently, what he worked on

was not present in the version that was leaked. But we would see this in another game Blizzard would cancel. But it just, what they had to change was just too expensive. and the genre they were working in was becoming irrelevant and other games were outclassing them. Like, The Curse of Monkey Island released in 96

and looks a ton better than this game. Like, it's in a higher resolution. The graphics are better. This looks kind of like full throttle and it's low-res glory. But they just decided, okay, we're going to cut our losses and cancel this game. And reading, I didn't get a chance to play the game,

but reading the Hardcore Gaming 101 article, which is really good, I suggest you look into it, they didn't know what to do with the story because there really wasn't much of a story. to Warcraft. There was enough to make a simple RTS, or a very good RTS, rather. But instead, they're like, okay, how about the orcs are an allegory for the displacement of Native Americans? And that's a good idea for Warcraft, right? We're going to handle this completely well in every way, because we're in the 90s. Of course, that didn't happen, and it's kind of embarrassing. It's like, oh, the orcs all live on reservations, and they drink a lot. Okay. Yes. Wow. I was going to say the movie did the same thing. It did just differently. Oh, the movie. Did you see the movie? No, but that's what I read about because, like, lore is told about, like, not only how you're told about what happened in the Zelda series. Someone says a paragraph, you see a hieroglyphic on the wall, but when it came to make a movie and an adventure game, obviously, you had to, like, give names and faces and, like, show what everybody was going through.

It is steeped in all of the kind of, like, noble savage archetypes that are very tired, and even by then, it was just like, oh, come on, guys, there are other things to do than this. but this would eventually become a it was salvage for a 2001 novel so you can read about the adventures of thrall or whatever I don't know his name is in that novel but again Blizzard is not afraid to kill things or change them drastically and at this point they're like we don't want to make an adventure game

and Blizzard made racing games they made the Lost Vikings they made Blackthorn they were not just the RTSPC people Justice League fighting games although I believe all of those games came out when they were still Silicon and Sineps. No, I think one of them has a Blizzard logo. I can't remember which one.

Maybe Rock and Roll Racing? No, that was Silicon and Cycles. Okay, well, but they were still the Blizzard folks, right? Sure. Okay, mostly. Okay. But yeah, so that was Warcraft Adventures. You can watch the entire play-through online.

It's about three hours. I'm not going to do that, but I read a summary of the game that... We're lucky. We brought it up. Yes. It does exist in some form. So I want to move on to our second and last game, which I think if you read Game Magazines in the 90s,

you knew as a viable. Silence thrill. A thrill kill developed by Paradox Entertainment and meant to be published by Virgin Interactive before they got absorbed by EA. Who knows about their thrill kills? I do. Yeah, I know a bit. There was a naughty nurse in it or something. There was a naughty dominatrix librarian and a dominator-d-judge.

Let's check the same boxes. Covering all the angles, really. I mean, what do you guys know about thrill-kill based on coverage? I mean, this game was covered. This game was review. This game. Given my age range, I just remember. I remember looking at it and like, sort of like not, not cringing, just like, at that point, I'd been reading everything voraciously and I'm this little kid and like, I don't want to have to defend video games again.

And thrill kill is going to make me do that. The public's going to catch wind and it's going to be the same shit over and over again and just bracing myself for the fallout of thrill kill. And it was in a game magazine world, it's just like, okay, it's coming out this month. Three months later, it's been canceled. God, God. It's been canceled for retooling. It was canceled entirely, but... It turned into the Wu-Tang Clan fighting here.

All new characters, they removed the hell setting, but this game is basically Bonestorm, and that it's like, it came after, it was a post-Senate Hearings pre-Columbine world where it's like, what can we get away with? Like, let's try to make this violent and sexy in a really gross way. And this game takes place in hell, and it's, you're either a someone who's been mutilated or, like, in the BDSM scene, and you're all fighting in a twist of metal style. competition to get out of hell, get your one wish or whatever. I wrote

down some of the more ridiculous characters. There's Bella Donna, of course, which I mentioned. She's the Dominatrix Librarian. Dr. Faustis, who's a plastic surgeon, who grafted a bear trap onto his face. And the imp, basically, he's a little person who is also evil. I'm the imp, and I'm evil. I'm here to say it. I can't remember someone with

Baraka-like blades for arms? Yes, there's a guy like that. I think he's got blades for arms and legs. But it's basically, it's a four-player fighter that predates power stone and the overall point of this is to fill your kill meter so you can perform one of four elimination

moves and once you are down to two opponents after you fight everyone your elimination moves turn into character specific fatalities and I have a link to a video fatalities. They are all pretty interesting but looking at them through 2017 eyes it looks like a bunch of

potatoes are exploding on the screen. A guy explodes in the parts and each part has four polygons and you're like what but there are some weird ones Like, the dominatrix, there is one quote-unquote fatality where it looks like she's going to go down on the character you're playing against. But the camera pans away and she's tickling their foot. This is awful. I'm not high-fiving that. With every one of her fatalities, she touches her breasts and her crotch and moans.

So it's a very, very, very classy game. I remember, it looks like Arby's marketing now with how polygonal these characters are. Arby's has better models actually I was relieved to find out this wasn't coming out but this in Starfucks 2 or one of the first games like the second I heard about their cancellation oh here they are online

they're online available to play I mean every group of friends I came in contact with had a copy of this game somehow even in the early days of the internet it was leaked probably on a news group somewhere or I don't know a where site I don't know where you would find it but I played this game on a e-mule

was that in 98 I don't remember It's E-Donkey, my bad. E-Donkey. Files, Limewire, is that a thing? I don't know. Kazah and Morpheus. But, yeah, this game was definitely emblematic of the how far can we go, Bonestorm era, Razor Fight 2, the slashing era of games.

I think the reporting was that E.A. was having none of that. They inherited it. That's correct. They were like, we are a family company, sir, and... Not there, like, but this is too much. We didn't put any money into this. Who cares? It's going away.

Virgin Interactive got absorbed. they were going to be the original publisher, and, yeah, EA threw it away. It was redeveloped into the Wu-Tang Clan fighting game. I'm not sure if that's any good. I don't know. Timeless, great. No one has anything bad to save that. If the Wu-Tangers blow each other up in any ways, the killer bees, if you will, I don't know if they do that.

I think, though, throwing this game away may have cursed EA to never put out a good arcade-style fighting game. What about Def Jam? I'm thinking more about, like, something you'd play in an arcade. Okay. Like, because they had the Marvel license for a hot minute, and they made the bright. of the imperfects. Nemesis. Imperfects?

Yes. We'll invent our own superheroes. Do against the superheroes you like? I do remember that? Yeah. So our last game. was in development for like six years. This game was in development so long.

I took reservations for it when I worked at GameStop. And, you know, I bet they pocketed all of that money and no one got it back. I wrote a Games Radar article of canceled games that were on magazine covers, like up to five times. Oh, wow. Ghost was one of them, right? I mean, when I worked at Future, it was still hanging in the office. Oh, wow. OXM, Star Trek Ghosts.

StarCraft. Don't. Your Trek Wars got me. I can't think of anything. And I'm trying. I'm still waking up in front of you guys. So Polygon wrote a great retrospective on the development of this game. I'll link to it in our blog post for the show.

But Ghost was essentially Blizzard's attempt to get back into the console world. They had become really primarily a PC developer, their biggest hits run PC, like Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo 2. They're like, there's still money in consoles. We don't want to leave this behind. Let's develop a stealth game. Stealth games are huge. And we want to make one of those for the PlayStation 2. Xbox and GameCube.

And they found a developer nihilistic software of head. They have a very 90s developer name. And they're mostly known for Vampire the Masquerade. They made things after that, but I think that is sort of their claim to fame. And people still like that game. It's a little flawed, but it's an interesting, I think it's a first-person RPG based on the tabletop game. I still need to play it. I hate nihilists.

Nihilists. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism. At least, it's an ethos. They cared about this game, though. They weren't total nihilists. but basically the premise of this was like what if you were in a Starcraft battle

and that was how they approached the design and this started in 2000 it was very open end of this development schedule there were no goal set Blizzard had a lot of money and that is a problem

because if you have a company that's a lot of money there's not a lot of pressure to actually get things done I find see also Half Life 3 exactly I find a smaller teams out of necessity

they have to make decisions they have to produce Unless you're game tech. Unless you're game tech, exactly. But they had the benefit or quote unquote benefit of Blizzard money. But Blizzard was working in Irvine and they were in the Bay Area. So they were hundreds of miles apart. They would just communicate through meetings and development kept changing.

And they kept changing producers of Blizzard. So every producer wanted a different thing. So every time a new big game would come out like Halo or something like that in this era, they would have to change their game to make it more like that. So it was basically responding to popular games of the era. That's the Duke Nukem Forever, Christ. Yes, exactly. Too bad that game wasn't canceled.

Too bad that gearbox, quote-unquote, fixed it. So development went on for so long that nobody even cared about stealth games anymore. And it soon became a multiplayer shooter developed by, oh, Swinging Ape Studios in 2004. So by 2004, Nielsen... Do you have a gorilla in a suit suit as their... It really should have. Like, smoking a cigarette with one of those big holders, I think. It wouldn't be the late 90s.

It's not for that image. No, it's actually an ape that's on his way to an orgy. Dropping keys in a fishbowl. An ape with his neighbor's wife on his arm. So, yeah, Blizzard didn't know what they want. They wanted. And the thing was, it's like, okay, now it's an action game. Okay, great.

Let's make an action game. Oh, there are new consoles coming out. Uh-oh. So that is essentially what killed. Oh, let's give them a water pack. Oh, God, no. they didn't do that. But that's eventually what killed this game.

The last people saw of it was at Bliscon 2005, but they were like basically, it's kind of assumed that there are new consoles. We can't release this game. It's gone on too long. Let's just cut ties. The final status was indefinite hiatus, but I think it's just gone forever.

And as we've seen with Overwatch, Blizzard is not afraid to kill giant projects. Overwatch is some of the remnants of Titan, which was going to be the World of Warcraft successor. And God knows how much. money and how many years were sunk into World of Warcraft. How many games you didn't see? Yes. And I'm sorry, into Titan

but look at Overwatch now. It's like immensely popular. Everyone loves it. It's everyone's game with the year for every year so far. So yeah, like good on Blizzard, but as we've seen with World of Warcraft Adventures, sorry, Warcraft Adventures and Starcraft Ghost, they are not afraid to kill a project. They have the money

and the luxury to kill these projects instead of releasing them. I think they learn from Ghost. I forget about that whole saga, but there's like probably dozens of fully developed Blizzard games you've never seen. They will no longer tell you about one until it's like a couple months that are paid out.

They could be as bad as Valve and just we made Left for Dead 3, 4, and 5 and we play them at lunch every day, but you can't touch them. Yeah, we've only let your Japanese uncle play them. I'll have to tell you about them. Oh, God. So we got no time left, but anything, we're missing, anything notable, anything I missed just to

throw out there. I'm sure you've seen more canceled games than I have, but I took this long press tour of Propaganda Studios in Vancouver to play the Pirates of the Caribbean. Oh, no. I am also at Assassin's Creed. The most violent thing ever with a Disney logo on it.

Somebody asked me to chime in on like an RIP when that developer folded and that game went away. But I've never seen a game develop from every stage where like I'm in the audio room. This is the ocean team. I've never seen a game that close up before, and it's gone.

The most remarkable experience I've had with a cancel game was what it was called. It was a GameCube baseball game superstar or super MLB Pinnup Chase.

MLB Pinnup Chase. That's it. Nintendo had a press event up in Seattle not at their studio but actually at the ballpark, the Mariners Ballpark,

which of course they co-owned at the time. That's right. So we went up to that and got to like walk around the actual, you know, on the field and then go back

behind the scenes and then go up to the you know the press box, whatever it's called, the, what's it called? Skybox. Skybox, that's it. And do demos and interview Reggie, and then the game didn't come out. But you played Mega Man Universe and lived, to tell the tale, right?

You're not blind, but you should be? I wish I had been blind when I played it. Did you at least go briefly blind? I was blind with grief. It should have been Mega Man powered up, too, but it was so bad. It just felt wrong and it looked ugly. Why was it ugly, I don't remember? It was just a very ugly-looking game.

Like, you know, did the 3D graphics, 2.5D, which powered up did really well. Mega Man X. Irregular Hunter or whatever, Maverick Hunter X. That looked pretty good. But whenever they put it onto an HD system, that just collapsed. And, yeah, it was supposed to be powered up with, you know, the assets of Mega Man 2. But it was not good. I just threw away my Enafune signed Mega Man Universe Flyer from Comic-Con. Oh, man.

But since they didn't have screenshots ready, it's just a screenshot of the robot Chicken-produced trailer that in a Funnay sign, like, that's a little odd, isn't it? Wait, Robot Chicken made a trailer for Mega Man Universe? Yeah. Interesting. But it's sort of like if Walt Disney... Well, there is a robot chicken

in Mega Man, too. That's true. Man, man, they ripped it off. Yes, there is. In that Woodman stage. I guess the one that I've seen that I can remember, I played a lot of games that shows it didn't come out, but the one I remember was... I played a lot of canceled Mega Man games.

A lot of canceled Mega Man games at Capcom. The one I remember that no one would have played was called Mr. Inkjet. It was a PSVita game that I played before the game, before the Vita released. And it was essentially a game built around the back touchpad, which was a miserable mistake. Don't base a game on that, but they tried. And there were a bunch of levels. And you're essentially, there's this flat Japanese businessman character.

It kind of reminded me of incredible crisis in that you're helping him through horrible things during the day in his daily life. And you're using your back, you're using your fingers on the back touch pad to control both his arms and legs to move him and dodge him and stuff like that. It didn't work out well. I could tell that they wanted to make it a game but couldn't really do it. So that was Mr. Inkjet. I think I wrote about it for one-up, but you can't read it anymore. So there's no loss there. I originally thought that I had went my entire 10-plus years and never played a canceled game.

Then I realized at E3 a few years ago, I got to, and this might not count, but I got to play, quote-unquote, Milo. It was at some Microsoft party, and I got to do, you know, connect sports and connect events. adventures, and then they're like, coming to this X, like, because we were Xbox Magazine, they're like, come in this new room. Milo's here. You can talk to Milo. And, of course, it turned out later, it was literally like the Wizard of Oz. There's somebody behind that curtain just, like, making Milo talk to you. Peter Mulling is hiding.

Doing his senior wences above the curtain. Yeah. So right, Dave. Right when I started at OXM, the very first issue that I worked on, our cover story was Brothers in Arms Furious Four. which also Wow That game series should have been called We're not Call of Duty

Yes We want to be Well they weren't when it started So that was our cancel game episode There will be another one of these If we can come up with more But those are the most notable ones

If you can think of any we miss Any big ones let us know in the comments We will hit them next time But let's wrap up I will go last Because I need to stop talking for a second Let's start with Dave Where can we find you Dave

For plugs I'm with Chris over at Laser Time Lasertime Podcast Network. We've got Lasertime, which is our flagship show about pop culture stuff. At 30, 2010, our show that goes back

10 years, 20 years and 30 years this exact week. I done the Robotech research because the movie, the movie came out like in select markets a week before Transformers the movie. So basically got his ass kicked

in a different way, the Robotech movie. Otherwise, I wouldn't know anything about it. But I love 30, 2010. It's a great place if you like movies, shows, and games.

And we talk about that week in history, 30, 20, and 10 years ago. Yeah, also video game apocalypse, our weekly video game show. Yes. And Talking Simpsons with... I'm on that. I might as well talk about myself for a minute. Talking Simpsons, yes, it's a great podcast about the Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons.

Every episode is a different episode. We should be kind of midway through season 5 by the time you hear this podcast. And we had the great Bill Oakley, co-runner of season 7 and 8 on our show for a full hour-long interview. What a great guest he was, hope he comes back. But, yeah, that's every Wednesday. at TalkingSimpsons.com, and as for me, you can find me on Twitter

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speaking of Good Intentions, please talk about what you're doing. You can find me at Retronauts.com here. This is my thing that I do all the time. Also, you know, as part of that, Game Boy World,

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the trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.