The part I find especially interesting is that there are probably literally thousands of games that get into more-or-less-working prototypes, the project gets cancelled for any number of reasons, and the game sits on a hard drive until it crashes, and is lost for forever.
I worked on a couple, for almost a year each. One made it into a Kotaku article before being canceled. http://kotaku.com/5686890/a-new-breed-of-survival-horror-com... A commenter was angry since they submitted the idea to EA when they were a tester, but oh well, no point now.
The other made it to a dummy Amazon listing before being canceled. It was basically Mario Party with old Atari properties. (I made about 30 "microgames" for it) You can see pictures of it and the first game in a former co-worker's portfolio here: http://portfolio.gen-n.net/basic-ui.html
The sad thing was (apart from this game being canceled meaning our dev studio was closed) that we took the project over from another studio that shut down, and we had a prototype that they were working on. We didn't have the code, though, so we started over.
I know it's kind of a miracle for any game to make it to the store-shelf, but I'd like to actually see a percentage at some point of how many games never make it, because I would suspect it's pretty high.
Try the satellite business... I had a string of 3 satellites (~8 years) that were complete and delivered to the customer, only to be blown up in the first 5 minutes after launch.
I worked as an engineer designing aircraft instrumentation systems for four years. I designed 6 entire systems for different aircraft platforms, only to have each project canceled before the system could actually be built and installed.
Shipping games & software has some distinct differences though, esp in gamedev.
Most of your credibility is based on the titles that you've worked on(and more importantly been credited on which is the largest difference). When a project gets canceled you don't get credited and in some cases can't even talk about what you worked on since the IP might have reverted back to the publisher.
Thrill Kill is an interesting example of this. The game was basically finished, but received an Adults Only rating, and then wasn't released. The devs supposedly leaked a copy of it, and it became one of the most widely pirated PS1 games.
The engine was later used the in the Wu Tang Clan fighting game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style, some X-Men Games and Rock Em Rock Em Robots game so it wasn't all bad.
Agreed on it being fairly decent too, but nothing to write home about (sans the violence).
Galloping Ghost Arcade outside of Chicago just finished restoring an Atari Beavis and Butthead prototype. The game was nearly finished and on initial test when it was killed. The restoration team needed to find an old 3DO unit to make it work again.
Reminds me of the RC build of The Red Star making the rounds in the office; everyone with a modded xbox ended up with a copy. From what I recall, the story was Activision canned it at the last minute then it was shopped to other publishers. One of them was us and a well-meaning individual starting distributing the game.
It was a fun game too, never understood why it died on the vine.
Well, I'm not sure of the legalities of such a thing. I'm sure I signed something somewhere that stated I must not do that. I can see lots of pages referencing the fact it existed, but I only saw one screenshot that looked like it came from the game.
It's all alpha quality stuff so it's not super interesting.
Fascinating and a little humbling how easily this gem could have been lost to the salvage yard. Makes you wonder how many other half finished games are sitting on decaying ROM chips on a shelf somewhere.
One nice thing about the whole open source movement is that sharing old binaries and source has become increasingly acceptable. To the point where some projects which run out of steam are left out there for the community to finish.
Hats off to the guys and gals who keep this gaming scene alive. I just wish I had more time to game it!
What I'm loving most about this link is the enthusiasm of the community on that board. It's really sweet to find these small communities on the web that still feel really tightly knit.
