2 Hours of Cancelled Games to Fall Asleep to

Did you know the character sister Sonic was going to be and we're quoting here a flirtatious and sexy bounty hunter in today's video we're going to separate fact from fiction with some new discoveries about the canell sister Sonic RPG we'll show new footage and behind the scenes info for Sonic day and finally reveal the plot of Sonic Chronicles 2 fans have been wanting to hear it for 15 years and we got it for Them let's go through these canceled games chronologically starting with sister Sonic back in 1991 Japanese Studio Nihon Falcom released a game called

popful mail for the pc88 home computer it was a sidescrolling action RPG starring a female bounty hunter named male a few years later rumors spread that Sega wanted to localize a Sega CD version of the game for America and replace M with Sonic's long-lost sister they basically did the same thing With PUO PUO back then too Sega was worried foreigners wouldn't buy it so they rebranded it as Dr robotnik's mean bean machine just like how Nintendo turned doy DOI Panic into Super Mario 2 or at least that's how the story goes but not a single

screenshot has ever been seen if you go looking for sources that sister Sonic ever existed the only citations are electronic gaming monthly more specifically just a couple sentences in the Magazine's gossip Section later called the rumor mill the rumor was that sister Sonic would be at an upcoming toy fair but that never happened in fact it was was never shown anywhere at all EG's gossip was unsighted with no reference to press releases Dev quotes or even Anonymous sources so we had to wonder was Sister Sonic ever a real thing or just a rumor masquerading his

fact for 30 years we've exposed fake canceled games in the past and this looked like it was going to be Another one so we went looking through old Japanese magazines and eventually we were able to find primary sources proving sister Sonic did exist but the rumors were only half true through in the November 1992 issue of Japanese magazine beep Mega Drive the director of Sega Falcom sits down for an interview and announces five games currently in development one of them was Sister Sonic which he says is further in development than any of their other games

and it's Not just a reskin like mean bean machine sister Sonic's going to be a full-on remake but she's not actually Sonic's sister we're going to quote him at length here keep in mind popful male was originally developed by nion Falcom and Sega FAL was a joint venture to bring neon's PC games to Sega consoles director Yano says Sega Falcom does more than just Port Nihon Falcom titles but reinterprets Nihon Falcom hit series in its own Sega Falcom way you could say We're cooking them up in a completely different form I want to emphasize that

neon's titles exhibit a different thought process and perspective on games among them is Sister Sonic a remake of popful male this doesn't mean she's Sonic's actual sister more like a female relative of the Sonic family the reason for creating this new character and remaking popful male is that it makes more sense for us to use Sonic who's already popular all around the world Sister Sonic is the game of our first five releases that we've made the most progress on so far further down the page it says sister Sonic is an action RPG based on popful

male starring the first female Sonic character sister Sonic as the main character the protagonist being a bounty hunter hasn't changed but sister Sonic isn't a cute character like male she's a more mature girl expect her to have a flirtatious and sexy charm of course the story's been Rewritten to fit The new characters it has more action than the original paired with the crisp animation and sound only possible on a CD ROM it'll release in Japan and overseas at nearly the same time with Japanese subtitles so let's clear up some misinformation we're specifically debunking Wikipedia here

but pretty much all the English language coverage of sister Sonic makes the same claims because they all pull from EG's gossip so first of all sister Sonic wasn't an American localization of popful maale it was a remake releasing worldwide including Japan second like we said sister Sonic wasn't Sonic's sister she was a sexy relative and third Sega wasn't trying to pass the game off as an original work they were always upfront that it was building on top of popful males Foundation actually if they had tried to pass it off as an original game it probably

wouldn't have gotten cancelled we bought bought this book From Japan it says when popful mail fans heard their favorite game was getting transformed into Sonic they started a mail-in campaign asking Sega to Faithfully Port popful mail to Sega CD a vehemo protest from fans it says they must have sent a ton of letters because Sega rolled over and did exactly that popful mail for Sega CD released in Japan in 1994 and in America a year later even without Sonic though it was still a remake just look at the pc88 Original compared to the Sega CD

version It's virtually unrecognizable now that's all cleared up you're probably wondering would sister Sonic have been any good probably Yes actually us reviewers scored the popful mail remake at about 8 out of 10 and these days it pops up on a lot of Sega CD top 10 lists it's kind of a cult classic and pretty pricey if you want to get a legit copy in the 9s it was praised for its visuals cutcenes music which you're hearing now and the Voice acting was impressive for its time most impressive I must admit who are you I'm

male pople male right now I'm after a dangerous magician called mutton head there's a big reward for him presumably sister Sonic would have gotten a similar reception but you know even better because it's Sonic and it probably would have taken Sonic fans another decade to get an internet connection and find out it was originally some other game sister Sonic could have been an interesting Chapter in the cannon and the franchise's first RPG but we'll never find out because Die Hard mail fans got it cancelled after sister Sonic got scrapped there's only ever been one RPG

in Sonic's 30-year history but there might have been a whole series of them if it wasn't for one man Sonic Chronicles the Dark Brotherhood was a Nintendo DS game developed by BioWare the same Studio who made Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect Chronicles Ended on a cliffhanger Sonic says we'll find out what happens in the next episode Tails promises another game and the last thing you see is the end question mark BioWare said they already had a precise idea what would happen in the sequel but unfortunately it never got made for the past

15 years Sonic fans have been wondering how the story would have continued so we talked to lead designer miles Holmes to get some answers and for some context let's sum Up the first game for folks who didn't play it or don't remember don't worry we'll make it quick so thousands of years ago there were two Waring a kidna kingdoms the knuckles Clan and the nocturnist clan they were bitter Rivals fighting over territory and Chaos Emeralds but fast forward to today and they're all extinct except for one last a kidna called knuckles as the last of

his bloodline he spends his days in solitude guarding the Master Emerald at The start of Chronicles 1 Knuckles gets kidnapped by some unknown Warriors after rescuing him Sonic and friends find out those warriors were part of the nocturnist tribe one of them is a female called shade seeing these ancient aidas blows knuckle's mind cuz he thought he was the last surviving a kidna but apparently no the rest of the nocturnist have been imprisoned in another dimension called the Twilight cage for thousands of years the mysterious God Argus locked them in there and trapped a bunch

of alien races from other planets in there too though no one knows why shade's Squad came to Earth to steal the Master Emerald and use its power to free the rest of her tribe but later it turns out the nocturnus is Chief a guy named I has a secret evil plan after the whole tribes freed and back on Earth I is going to wage war to conquer the planet this comes as a shock to shade who wants no part in a war of aggression so she Join joins up with Team Sonic I takes the Master

Emerald and warps back to the Twilight cage Our Heroes chase after him yada yada yada superon Sonic defeats I and the rest of the nocturnist are left to rot in the Twilight cage with their mission complete team Sonic heads home but realize time had been flowing slower in the Twilight Dimension while they were gone it felt like a few hours to them but several years passed back on Earth and eggman's taken over the world Since no one was there to stop him and the game ends there on a cliff ER and here's how it would

have continued straight from Sonic Chronicles lead designer miles Holmes picking it up from the Cliffhanger they come back and it's and it's now eggman's world right um so that's a little bit the the Back to the Future too kind of vibe we talked about like like Skynet in Terminator 2 you know when you get to see the future when you get to see what Kyle Reese is is From it's like but it's now it's all Eggman stuff you know so in this case it's Eggman is is basically unchecked by Sonic as has been able to

do what he's always wanted to do right take over and and remake the World In His Image so a lot of the the population has been rounded up and they're prisoners or they're slaves or whatever and uh you've got machines eggman's machines are you know this very dystopic kind of uh Terminator future so part of that would Have been the fun of being able to go to you know famous world landmarks and seeing them remade in this Eggman style so you know like an having going to Paris and seeing like eggman's gear all over the

Eiffel Tower ort of watching down with a big eye or something like that when Sonic and Company return to eggman's Earth their ship crashes and everyone's scattered to the winds so the players following multiple parties and populating them in different locations Always on the run always fighting to see another day eventually they get to the point where they're freeing populations from eggman's captivity so they can build a multinational Army to storm eggman's base and restore World Order just as they're about to do exactly that Argus shows up if you recall Argus was the Mega God

alluded to in the first game much worse than Eggman even super Sonic's not strong enough to beat Argus so in spite of everything Sonic and Eggman join forces to take him down Eggman uses his Mega Death laser to fire supersonic out like a bullet to break through argus's defenses thus ending the first boss phase with Argus weakened the Twilight cage is thrown open and everyone who is trapped inside is set free and joins in a massive climactic battle to finish off Argus once and for all by the time everything wraps up Knuckles is freed his

fellow aidas along with everyone else in the cage and Together with shade now he's got the potential to continue his bloodline Eggman runs off yelling until next time Sonic and so the status quo is back to normal the end well except for the final teaser it was established in the first game that the Twilight cage is a pocket Dimension where the nocturnist and other alien races are imprisoned but you never know why the truth would have been revealed in the sequel long ago an oracle told ARG that someday he'd die at The hands of a

mortal so Argus traveled the universe locking up entire races that could possibly be a threat in hopes of escaping the prophecy of his own death but in the final teaser it'd be revealed that the oracle's prediction was actually a trick by gathering up the most powerful races in the universe Argus was unknowingly building a super team that could destroy him it was basically a manipulation so we're left with this notion of okay well who's the Oracle who's this trickster God that got him to do this in the first place because obviously he wanted all of

this to happen he wanted Argus defeated and now with him out of the way the the the longer question that would have held that could have been used over the series is Okay so we've defeated this one God but now there's this other God that that made all these things happen why did he do that uh what was it for and will it eventually threaten us and You know if the series was going to continue then yes obviously this is this is going to be a problem and we'll come back to it it wasn't another

Cliffhanger more like a te that left room for more sequels BioWare would have considered their work finished with this duy but hoped another Studio or Sega themselves would continue Chronicles as a long running Series so that begs the question why didn't Chronicles 2 get made the first game sold about a million copies It was bioware's first everever handheld game and they considered it a success review scores came in around 75% pretty on par with Sonic games of that era Chronicles was basically free money and brand exposure for Sega so they were happy as well in

fact Sonic Team told BioWare they wanted to use shade and Argus in their own games and the BioWare guys were thrilled to hear it but there was one little problem the Sonic comics a lot of the comics published from 1994 To 2006 were authored by Ken penders in Ken's view the characters he created for the comics belong to him not Sega shade in Chronicles is similar to Knuckles girlfriend Julie Sue from Knuckles the Akida Issue 4 likewise the nocturnist clan bears resemblance to the dark Legion from issue 1 the Twilight cage is akin to the

Twilight Zone from issue 17 and so on Ken started copyrighting all his Creations 2 months after Chronicles launched then a series of lawsuits Kicked off between Ken Sega BioWare and the comic book publisher sega's position was basically that they own the Sonic brand therefore they own the rights to everything published in Sonic comics long story short Sega wanted the fight to stay between Ken and the comic book company but ultimately got pulled in anyway and the whole thing dragged on for years you know I I find it very puzzling uh honestly I I've worked with

other people's IP for a long time um as As he has and I've never had any kind of notion that I own anything that I'm doing in somebody else's sandbox I think if um Sega had taken him seriously and litigated properly it very quickly would have gone away but it was probably a a series of unforced errors that led to the result that that we got we reached out to Ken so he could give his side of the story you can pause and read his full response if you like because some of the legal details

aren't otherwise Findable online but to sum it up he sees himself as a small Creator defending his work from billion-dollar corporations who want to take it for themselves those corporations owe him millions of bucks for using it in Sonic Chronicles and their lawyers couldn't convince a judge that Ken was off his rocker maybe Sega feels they should own these characters but they never had that in writing more recently Ken made some artwork for Sonic nfts to establish stronger Le ownership Over his characters and Sega haven't tried to stop him maybe because they know they can't

they're priced at 100 Grand each in case you're curious Ken says he's not an unreasonable man if Sega ever wants to pay him for the rights to make Sonic Chronicles 2 he'll happily sit down at the negotiating table keep in mind all that's Ken's words not ours and we gave this script to both miles and Ken before publication to make sure we presented everything Accurately and without bias as for who's right well that's for you to decide either way there's never going to be any re-releases of Sonic Chronicles or a sequel until a deal is

made in the courts that'll probably never happen which means Sonic Chronicles 2 will never be anything more than the plot outline you heard in this [Music] video back in 2018 Sega was impressed with the successes of British developer Nitrome so they invited them to come up with a Sonic game then they did it was called Sonic day a OneTouch runner for smartphones with a new genesis style level added every single day Mario run meet Sonic the Hedgehog basically we spoke to Nitrome director Matt annel to get the full story and never-before seen footage Sonic day

was based on nitrome's wildly successful 2016 game leap day which was downloaded over 10 million times purely by word of mouth without 1 Cent spent on Advertising nitrome's been making games for 20 years maybe you've heard of some recent ones like bomb chicken and Shovel Knight dig anyway they just happened to run into Sega reps at GDC who after hearing about Leap Day asked if they'd be interested in pitching a leap like Sonic over the next year Sega tracked leap days metrics had Nitrome provide some mockup screens shots and eventually build the demo you're seeing

now Matt and a couple Other guys whipped up one level in 6 weeks but of course they would have had a lot more levels and a bigger team if it went into full production the pitch went all the way up to chain from Sega of Europe to Sega of America to Sega Japan But ultimately they passed on the project I General sort of answers seem to be that they had a few projects that and they could only do so many at once because someone had to kind of look over them and they just didn't think

that it Had as much potential as other things that they had going on so it is what it is it was disappointing you know obviously we were really Keen to make it it would have been an exciting project Sonic day was a secret until a few years later when Nitrome posted one minute of gameplay on their Twitter account people loved it but there was also some backlash from fans mad at Sega for rejecting the pitch Sega weren't thrilled about it to say the least Nitrome never meant for that to happen and were quote devastated by

the negativity they posted the footage because they made it and loved it and wanted Sonic fans to see it Matt told us Sega has every right to reject a pitch and he realizes what's fun isn't necessarily what's profitable maybe Sega made the right call no hard feelings especially since things kind of worked out for Nitrome anyway after Sega said no apple approached them about making a Sequel to Leap Day called super Leap Day Apple paid to make it exclusive to Apple arcade and the sequel ended up making just as much money as the first game

Matt couldn't say how much because of his contract but it's a lot and they actually took some of the ideas they would have added to Sonic day and put them in super leap day instead for example the Sonic demo only had vertical running but if they' continued development they would have added Horizontal running as well they also would have had loop-de-loops as you can see in this development footage that's it's basically halfway between Sonic and Super leap day and there would have been unlockable mini games like the special stages from Sonic 1 and pinball stages

because of the franchise's long history with pinball Sonic day could have been a great little game with new content 7 days a week that leaves one last question could Sonic day still get made Someday Matt says you know we're Sega Fanboys I had all the Sega systems growing up we love Sega games if Sega see this video if they want to pick up this project or something else with us we'd be [Music] happy the release of Okami in 2005 was greeted with n Universal Acclaim but it was only over time that its cult following would

fully Blossom semi-regular re-releases have kept Memories of the game alive and helped introduce it to New audiences it's understandable then that fan demand for an Okami 2 has endured Capcom did attempt a sequel of a it own on Nintendo DS the less successful Okami Den will B it without the involvement of The Originals developers Clover dudio and its director Hideki Kia it's partly for this reason that requests to see a quote unquote true sequel continue as enthusiasts entertain the prospect of a Followup helmed by those responsible for the first game in this video I bring

you the story of how such a project did once come close to finally happening suggestions of an Okami 2 project have a long history and not just among fans Fel has been added to the fire on numerous occasions by Hadi Kier himself a year after Clover Studio disbanded in 2006 the director spoke to Kaku about his desire to create a sequel to Okami but Shared word of a possible obstacle in the way of one happening in the near future he said that okami's producer atsushi anaba had gotten into an AR document with the heads of

Capcom an incident which he also attributed as one of the reasons for Clover being shut down by them kamama and daaba by this point both work together at seed Inc which would later become Platinum Games after a merger of odink in 2007 the possibility of Bad Blood between Capcom And Inaba was the subject of speculation for some time to come possibly spurred on by platum games and Capcom having little to know public relationship rumors about the two possibly collaborating with persist in various forms over the years despite this without anything meaningful materializing from them Platinum

found work elsewhere finding a partner in Sega who published projects of theirs like Bayonetta and Vanquish it wasn't until Around a decade after the split between members of platinum and Capcom that talks between the two parties reportedly started to resume speculation about possible preliminary discussions between members of Capcom and platinum started to heat up back in 2015 at Gamescom in August of that year Kya talked to Metro about the possibility of working with Capcom in the future he said there's a sense that if there's ever a chance that we can not only work together but

help Bring new life into maybe a Capcom title or work on a Capcom partnership I would very much welcome the opportunity in that same interview he noted that he was planning to meet with a certain Capcom producer after I return from Gamescom I'm meeting up with June takauchi at Capcom and we're going to talk about what been going on and this is long overdue it's unknown if this meeting had any place in reinvigorating relations between Capcom and platinum but it was Not long after this that representatives of the two companies are said to have begun

meeting in late 2015 in what might also be connected to these events Kya happened to issue a poll on Twitter in November 2015 asking fans which Capcom project they would like to see him tackle the two options listed were for either a sequel to Okami or Devil May Cry according according to sources linked to the two companies discussions between Capcom and platinum were being Spearheaded primarily by katsu Minami the founder and then president of Platinum Games over the years he had developed a reputation in the industry for his Keen ability to cut deals with large

Publishers he has been credited with arranging Partnerships with Nintendo Activision Square Enix and Microsoft as the prolific Studio continued piling on more work he now had capc common his sites for a potential collaboration employees from the Publishers say this interest was reciprocated by Capcom who had been privately expressing an interest in Reviving some of their classic IPS now the possibility arose that Platinum Games could be responsible for developing one of those revivals sources associated with the two entities say that the talks were amicable but Capcom had its share of reservations of outworking with Platinum Chief

among which were cost related it was estimated By capcom's people that Outsourcing a major project to platinum would cost cost significantly more than it would to develop it internally they also had concerns about the management of platinum and their ability to reain in their directorial talent to keep projects on schedule and within Budget on the other hand Capcom had plenty of positives they were weighing up about the studio as well hiring Platinum Games for a big budget resurrection of a Beloved IP would be an easy way to score a healthy dose of Goodwill from fans

another important factor that was apparently influencing capcom's decision was platinum's experience with unre engine 4 born out of a partnership with epic games Japan Capcom had been licensing ue4 to develop one of the biggest games in their lineup at the time Street Fighter 5 impressed with its capabilities and having secured a licensing Arrangement they were now Interested in building feature tiles in this engine and were looking for teams with the know how to use it it just so happened that Platinum Games was in the middle of developing an Unreal Engine full game of their own

scalebound oh over time it seems that Platinum was able to put some of capcom's doubts to rest several workers privy to the discussions say that by early 2016 talks had progressed to the two parties discussing specific properties they Could potentially work on one was intended to be selected and a project would enter pre-production at an undecided point in the new future at Platinum sources indicate that two of the series they had narrowed down to were Okami and Beautiful Joe however out of these two Capcom report Ely favorite Okami although there was some enthusiasm for vul

Joe making a return among some Platinum staff capcom's higher ups were apparently concerned about the Property's commercial viability the original games were modestly successful back in the 2000s even spawning an anime adaptation but Capcom had done little to maintain awareness of beautiful Joe post 2005 aside from a port to the PS2 the first game had never been re-released and it had been over 10 years since the last game in the series fful Joe Double Trouble conversely Okami had enjoyed numerous reissues on the Wii and PS3 granting the IP greater mind share in The long term

as negotiations continued an Okami 2 a proposed true successor to the c classic became the front runner the long running Gulf between Capcom and platinum was closing as preliminary plans were on the table before any kind of development could begin however a potential deal was put into Jeopardy by events surrounding Platinum game CEO Katsuya Minami several sources connected to the two companies claimed that a rift was forming between Minami and the rest Of his own Studio Minami had reportedly been at odds with other senior members of platinum over his management of the company allegations regarding

the nature of their disagreements are wide ranging in their severity some say that minami's lack of communication with members of the studio had alienated him other former employees alleged that important financial matters too were being kept from platinum's board by Minami these rumors about possible issues with his Management of the company began spreading in early 2016 then on April 21st 2016 the news emerged that tsuya Minami was stepping down from his roller Platinum Games for unspecified reasons he had quietly departed from the company in March sources inside Platinum at the time claimed that Minami was

ousted from the company by board members as an outcome of his ongoing disagreements with them before long these events would lead to the potential project with Capcom Coming Undone prematurely hearing word of turmoil at Platinum capcom's management took action scrapping plans to move forward with a new Okami a risk verse Capcom had already been cautious in their approach to the possible collaboration and their Chief point of contact at Platinum abruptly leaving was enough for them to put a stop to it a project heavily requested for over 10 years was over before it could begin tatsuya

Minami stepped back from the Games industry and and Platinum Games continued work on of projects sources at Capcom suggest that the company still enjoys a friendly relationship with platinum and despite this setback a partnership with them is not beyond the realm of possibility in March 2018 Hideki Cameo was pictured at Capcom playing a build of Okami HD on Nintendo switch prior to its announcement for a superhero of his popularity video games based around DC Comics character The Flash have been notably few in number throughout his history history after making his game debut in 1993 on

the Sega Master System his representation in video games declined sharply with only a couple of exceptions like a Game Boy Advan beat him up by Way Forward in 2006 following that game's release the rights to use the property in video games went up for sale it would end up being Brash entertainment an up and cominging new publisher that would seize this Opportunity set on making fans The Flash video game that they had been longing for brash was a company founded in 2007 with the goal of creating games using well-known own movie television and Comics licenses

their intention was to produce projects that could hold their own against some of the most critically acclaimed games in the industry these were supposed to be highquality experiences that would rebuild consumer trust in tiin games to achieve this goal Brush's people began scouting the developers that they thought would be best suited to their ever expanding catalog of ips for the flash they approached bottle rocket entertainment this was a developer that largely consisted of former Sony San Diego employees who had worked on cult PS2 action adventure title The Mark of cre the members of brash assigned

to work on the project were Avid fans of the mark of cre in particular of its unique Combat system that bottle rocket held the payon for the management of bottle rocket had been desperately searching for a new project and jumped at the chance to work on it by July 2007 development was underway for Xbox 360 and PS3 with a Nintendo Wii version plan to initial ideas for the game were fairly vague but the developers knew that it would be an open world game with a lineup of the Flash's most iconic villains the exact scope of

the open World however was subject to some back and forth an early suggestion that was floated by the design team must to have the flash zipping All Over America to a number of different cities these would have been notable locations associated with famous DC characters he would be notified of Another Hero for example Batman needing assistance with an incident in Gotham and would have to fast travel over there to help them deal with whatever a crisis they were up Against this concept was quickly dropped seen as being over ambitious for their first attempt at The

Flash creating multiple open worlds and executing them well would have been difficult to manage instead they would focus their efforts on doing an open world which encompassed two neighboring cities integral to the flash Central City and Keystone City the general look of the setting according to one artist was inspired by The Incredibles and the original Mirror's Edge although the two separate cities were meant to look distinct from one another it was designed to appear as though Central City had one foot in the future and Keystone had one foot in the past some of the earliest

work on the project includ included a vast assortment of concept art showing the Myriad of characters that they intended to work into the story and some test animations The Game's plot was being handled mostly by bottle rockets Designers some of whom were very familiar with the source material it was also being overseen by veterans Comics writer Marv Wolfman known for his work on new Teen Titans and crisis on infinite Earths while the designers tried to form a story that would work best for a video game project in terms of scale and structure Wolfman was tasked

with helping them fill in the details the relationship between the three major parties involved in Development bottle rocket Brash entertainment and Warner Brothers proved amicable and functioned well Warner and brush supported the developers on the vast majority of their ideas resulting in a healthy creative environment with plenty of freedom to experiment one of brush's only demands was that it would center around the Wally West version of The Flash who at the time was the prominent iteration of the character in the comic box Brash and Bot rocket had a Vision for their use of Wally in

the game it would be his equivalent of Batman's year one story it would be set within the first 12 months of his superhero outings as he gets to grips of his abilities and the Flash's long list of pre-established Rivals Wally was not the only Flash in this universe as he was picking up the mantle after Barry Allen who was no longer around the idea behind Wally starting the game as something of a rookie was to give the Developers a device to gradually introduce new game mechanics to the player as while he continued to discover the

extent of his powers the player 2 would steadily learn more about how to use them much of development on the game was spent fine-tuning the controls and balancing accessibility with giving players a good level of control over the flash he could turn 180° on a dime at the push of a button and they were considering adding a 90° turn to the Shoulder buttons allowing him to change directions instantly one developer I spoke to compare this to the light cycles from Tron for the developers encapsulating the sensation of moving at high speed was top priority they

spent months tweaking the mechanics trying to find how to make it feel right initially they thought that slowing down everything in the flight as's environment when he was in motion might be a good way to accurately portray his Powers however upon experimenting they realized that it failed to convey the thrill of speed to the player moving past objects like cars while they were suspended in slow motion might have been more comic accurate but the developers arrived at the conclusion that this simply wasn't as fun as having them move normally a greater impression of speed was

created by having the vehicles move at their standard Pace as they rushed past the player the only times when a Slow-mo effect would be activated were when the flash reached his absolute fastest setting or pulled off a special attack eventually they settled on several different levels of speed for the Flash's movement that the player could cycle through this started with a standard walking pace moving up to the speed of an Olympic runner and then into two different set levels of Super Speed The Flash would build even more momentum by pulling off tricks in the air

Grinding off rails and running without being stopped once he gained enough speed he could run up the side of buildings and Propel himself over through the air using a combination of speed aerial tricks and combos he could reach previously inaccessible areas in the Overworld in the final version of the game he was intended to be able to go faster than he could in any of the Prototype builds seen here early on the developers discussed whether or not Their version of The Flash would be able to phase through matter passing through objects as he could in

the comics including this power posed potential design problems communicating to players what they could and couldn't phase through would be difficult and allowing them to do it with anything in the environment just wouldn't be technically possible POS rather than frustrate the expectations of the player or confuse them the ability was dropped and they Came up with an alternative as the player approached high speed rather than vibrating through obstacles they would increasingly gain more mass and be able to plow through them with tremendous force in its prototypes the game was using a combat system that was

very similar to the one invented by bottle rocket staff in the mark of Cree both with the othered twist of the character's superhuman abilities you would see button prompts floating above Enemies and would then have to tap the corresponding buttons to zip towards them instantly and launch into an attack a lot of the combat would have been focused on crowd control and negotiating combo moves there would have been a myriad of different combos you could perform and it was all about quickly managing which enemy took which part of the combo as you built it up

and the blows became more powerful Landing attack successfully would fill up a Speed force meter on the hood granting you access to superpowered special moves the flash could run in a circle to create tornadoes or move so fast that he would generate speed ghosts mirages of himself that would distract enemies he would even be able to access the Flash's trademark infinite Mass punch the structure of bottle rockets Flash game worked as followed the player had access to a map covering both Keystone and Central City which they could travel Between fairly quickly objectives would be broadcast

to the flash via a police radio headset implemented into his suit courtesy of an ally of his monitoring the city these would be added to his map and would either be obligatory missions needed to advance the story or side quests that would regularly emerge completing these side events was totally optional but the player was encouraged to complete them by an in-game morality stroke XP system called the hero rating Essentially you would gain points towards your hero rating from finishing quests and this would help you unearth Clues unlocking more story missions and other content there would

have been a wide variety of different optional scenarios for you to interact with one minute flash could be stopping a carjacking or a bank robbery the next he could be catching someone falling off a building or saving them from a traffic accident the catch was that while you Weren't forced to do all of these that each one of them had a time limit within which you could do them this was intended to be a subversion of the time demission mechanic introduced by Dead Rising in 2006 by Design Dead Rising made it somewhat difficult for players

to complete all of its time scenarios before they would expire you would have to manage your time carefully to decide which to complete and in what order a frantic twist to create a sense of Tension with the flash on the other hand ball rocket had a character that was logically fast enough to complete multiple objectives like those in a very short space of time although you would have a timer for each event these timers would actually Slow Down based upon the speed at which Wally was traveling finishing these on neglecting them would have far-reaching consequences

that would become evident as the player explored the world if the flash was more Successful and began to resolve a decent amount of them the environment would change for the better the civilian population would start to appreciate the flash more cheering him on as he passes them they would pain street art in his honor stores would start selling flash themed products and the streets would become slightly more busy as people became more at ease eventually as your rating maxed out you would see them erect statues of The Flash Central City Would open the flash Museum

and the more you played through the story The more memorabilia would be added to it to celebrate his victories conversely you could try ignoring the needs of the people and would see the negative side effects of doing so the populace would start to turn on the flash as he got less favorable coverage from the news media as crime figures Rose you'd start hearing distant gunfire and police sirens and seeing buildings being Vandalized this is just a very small sample of the many positive and negative effects they were going to add the main story was planned

to have around 10 to 15 chapters in all each one revolving around a different member of the flashes Rogues Gallery 11 different bosses had been concepted over the course of development with a variety of Unique Designs these included weather wizard murmur Captain Boomerang Pi Piper the top and mirror Master Captain Cold was Intended as one of the earliest foes you would encounter after robbing a bunk he attempts to flee using his getaway van the player need to keep up with him as he shot at you and Co the roads in ice in an effort to

stop you to beat him you need to Ram into him enough to make him crash after that he would use a device to generate an ice shield to protect himself while fending off his hengen you would have to break holes in his defense enough to reach him with your attacks Top hit was another fight that they had mapped out which would have been set in a construction site and would have been one of the largest bosses in the game flash would have to zip about dividing his attacks and making use of the construction equipment around

him he would need a dump concrete on top of him and wait for it to harden before unleashing a special Air Attack to smash it and weaken him some of the other bosses involved Less Direct Confrontations and were more about thwarting their evil plans over simply providing a Beatdown the trickster for example would have dispatched a number of remote control cars of explosives attached to them around the cities The Flash would have to travel around the map disarming them before they could reach their targets eventually he would obtain enough data from the devices to track

the trickster's location and apprehend him a version of the Shandi Project kmas group from the comics was also said to have a background role in the story in this appearance they would have been an evil organization intent on opposing metahumans in particular The Flash at one point in the story they would have captured the original flash Jay Garrick imprisoning him and stealing his blood for their experiments they would have used it to genetically engineer their foot soldiers to create new enemies for the flash known as speed Demons he would occasionally run into these around the

open world groups of armed soldiers capable of super speed that he would have to defeat by making them crash into oncoming obstacles or slamming them into barriers overall there was a lot of thought and consideration being put into the narrative dils making up the world of The Flash although it would take a while for the true overarching plotline that was weaved throughout the game to come To the foreground ultimately the player would learn that the character that has been feeding you information throughout the whole game via your headset is none other than the Flash's Nemesis

Professor Zoom hiding in plain sight under his civilian altero Hunter zon frustrated and tired of being defeated Zoom Enlisted the aid of gorilla garad together they have constructed and hidden a series of devices around the cities these machines are activated when The flash Taps into the speed force to use his powers and the more this happens the more energy they consume and disrupt the city they would start to produce Rifts pulling civilians into the speed Dimension itself eventually Wally would come to realize his plan he has been harvesting energy and trapping people inside it to

draw Wally in since Zoom has a greater level of control over the elements inside the speed Dimension Hunter helping Wally was all of front to Manipulate him into using his abilities around the cities gorilla grod's role was developing new technology for zoom's machines and secretly enhancing the villains around the cities Wally would have confronted Grant and his army of gorillas who are attempting to Stage a breakout at iron Height's prison a huge brawl between them and sues eventually ending in grod's defeat as the finale continues The Flash travels into the speed Dimension to face Professor

Zoom Liberate the civilians and put a stop to his plan against the odds this was about as far as writing on the story had got although M Wolfman was still expected to make alterations as they moved forward outside of the single player the team also had planned an online multiplayer mode this would have pitted up to four players against one another in a superpowered race to the Finish he would have been able to choose from a wide selection of enhanced and superhuman Individuals including aadmer Speed Demon the Soviet agent Christina from the blue Trinity group

Bari Allen Jay Garrick John Fox Max Mercury the Rival impulse Kid Flash Jesse quick Johnny quick XS black flash and lastly Professor Zoom stroke reverse flash they also wanted to find a way to make Superman playable in this mode which would have been a possibility since BR did own the rights to use him in video games The Flash video game was in development for just Over a year it was given the working title of the flash the fastest man alive and was on schedule to launch at the end of 2009 around 30 staff members at

B rocket entertainment worked on it at the time they had the vast majority of the city landscape up and running and were starting to build models for their proposed boss battles like mirror Master the narrative elements were yet to be finalized and no voice actors were ever cast although the team did have an idea Of who they wanted to play Wally West actor Ryan Reynolds work on the title had progressed well as the company comfortably met each deadline given to them the game's eventual collapse was an unfortunate casualty of huge mistakes made by their publisher

brush entertainment and was completely beyond their control brush had been set up and sold to investors on the promise that it would deliver a new gold standard for licensed video games as of 2008 the Publisher had failed to live up to these sentiments their management had almost no shared experience of running a game publisher and most of them had never even worked in the industry it was a company ran out of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood mostly by film producers and businessmen from backgrounds in other Industries essentially they try to run the business as if it

was a Hollywood movie studio taking on Lower budget lesser quality tians first as a means of Funding the more ambitious projects like the flash that they actually were interested in doing the managers of brash cut Corners desperate for work they signed contracts with film studios which forced their developers into making games within extremely short development Cycles their jumper video game for instance was made in around only 6 months this bold strategy of theirs didn't pay off critics gave scaving reviews to their games and sales Were well below expectations their investors began to pull out one

after the other as 2008 went on altogether this crippled the publisher financially towards the end of the year their development Partners around the world like bottle rocket inexplicably stopped receiving payments from them by November it was official Brash entertainment was filing for bankruptcy and ceasing its operations without a publisher to fund it bottle rocket was left with no other Option but to permanently stop development on the flash bottle rocket was able to survive into 2009 working with Namco on a reboot of Splatterhouse however a tense creative conflict between the two part led to its demise

Namco looking for developers who would challenge them less pulled the project away from them and changed it drastically without new work bottle rocket entertainment was forced to close its stors in September 2009 today the Flash the fastest man alive survives only in the private collections of former developers many of them have held on to and preserved a vast amount of assets from the project and it stands as a testament to how passionately many of them felt about it as Marvel's Cinematic Universe was first Dawning 2007 Soul Warner Brother quietly plotting an aggressive multimedia strategy to

push some of DC's Premier Superheroes into the spotlight movies like Christopher Nolan's Batman series were a given but video games had an important role to play in this plan too they had laid out a slate of big budget games centered around various Key Properties to be made by some notable Western Talent their intended lineup included an open world game based around the flash by batt rocket entertainment a Batman Title by Rocksteady and Superman from Factor 5 this onslaught of DC Superhero content was set to kick into overdrive with the Justice League mad Marx director George

Miller had signed on to hel a Justice League movie initially scheduled to drop in 2009 coinciding with its release would be a video game being prepared by double helix games it was being developed with Xbox 360 as the lead development platform with Nintendo Wii and PS3 versions planed too the project began in around early 2008 when the video game Division of Warner Brothers contacted them to see if they would be interested in producing such a title wb's guidelines appear to have been fairly loose but by all accounts they wanted an action game specifically with a

varied selection of playable characters that would include the call members of the Justice League like Batman Superman and Wonder Woman according to a former employee from double helix the company was taed to develop it due to their People having experience in making similar license games double helix was formed in 2007 out of a merger between shiny entertainment and the collective Inc prior to the merger the collective had been subject to mass layoffs when that Dirty Harry video game was cancelled after years in development this meant most of the developers that made up double helix after

the two merged originated from shiny entertainment since the collective had Just been downsized so considerably one of shiny's last projects before the transition was 2005's The Matrix Path of of Neo a third person action game that recreated the events of the Matrix films it had gared a somewhat decent critical reception and as it would turn out admiration from those in charge at Warner's interactive entertainment this led them towards approaching the newly formed double helix who accepted the job before long their first move was to make A series of prototypes to establish a few basic mechanics

in search of a style of gameplay well suited to a Justice League video game in their first playable demo they landed on something not far from what the game would eventually grow into the scenario put the player in control of Batman in a Gotham City back alley who had to fight off a series of nondescript enemy robots the early proof of concept was inherently primitive but adequately Conveyed their ideas and how they intended to follow through on them according to a developer from the team it directly lifted technology that was originally built for Path of

Neo and of game that heavily Incorporated Han toan combat with multiple enemies simultaneously their cost-saving ability to repurpose pre-existing Tech like this would understandably land them in good favor with Warner Brothers double helix expanded around this time bringing on a Number of employees on a contract basis to work on concept art through pre-production the period that would follow was spent negotiating the luck of the game and the characters that would feature they looked at plenty of different options for playable characters before narrowing it down to a tentative number of 16 the character roster chosen featured

five different Justice League members Batman Superman Wonder Woman The Flash and Green Lantern The only active member of the group that wasn't playable was Martian Manhunter with the justification given that he acts as a guide character during the game monitoring the other characters from a distance and updating them on their objectives throughout the story The Sunstone is spreading destroy it quickly players would have also been able to unlock villains corresponding to the different franchises being represented such as Bane from Batman or Green ltin Sinestro digging a bit deeper into DC history they added a few

more for good measure like the Arthurian sorceress Morgan Lefay Lady Shiva and a female version of eclipso the game had two modes a story mode and a versus Suite both using the same gameplay that of a fairly straightforward Arena brawler game that was big on environmental destruction players would beat up opponents using fighting game style light heavy and grapple attacks And could use a tag team mechanic to switch out their character for another on the fly at the start of each session players would select two characters to cycle between mid game in the story mode

you would choose between the aforementioned five playable Justice League members each with their own unique attributes offering different advantages for players to weigh up the Flash's trademark speed allowed him to move so fast that enemies would slow Down around him or Green Lantern could generate a protective shield for instance these buff effects could then be shared between the different Heroes as you alternated between them occasionally your choice of characters would influence the in-game dialogue which was going to be fully Vice acted the story mode acted as a tour around various iconic DC Universe local such

as Gotham City Themis skira and the Justice League Watchtower each Mission would see Members of The League clash with a different villain and their respective underlings throughout the stage for example a Superman Centric level sent Metropolis tasks you with thwarting the plans of Cyborg Superman who is reprogrammed an army of manhunters to do his bidding successfully defeating each villain would then allow you to purchase them from a store interface using experience points SC during the campaign through an injection of light RPG Elements introduced by the team the in-game currency could also be spent on enhancing

Your Heroes in the story mode players could level up their individual damage and health in addition to purchasing and upgrading new moves for them this would open the gateway to more powerful attacks like the Flash's Crimson tornado since it was planned to release alongside the George Miller Justice League movie WB was taking steps to make the game tie into it although The finer details of how exactly this would have happened were never decided the plan of the video game was supposed to take place in the same world as the film a universe in which the

league has already been in operation for a number of years and superheroes are an everyday fact of life the game would have opened to Hal Jordan's Green Lantern battling manhunters on warworld an artificial planet that has been imprisoning superpowered individuals and making them Fight to the death in its deadly Gladiator Arenas that brawling is interrupted when War world's leader the cosmic super villain Mongol enters the ring as green lanter the player must defeat him in the game first boss encounter a cut scene plays once Mongol is defeated in which Green Lantern seals him inside an

energy construct made by his ring before he's able to escape an all powerful guardian of the universe arrives to cast judgment on Mongol for His transgressions for genocide and other crimes against the universe the guardian permanently imprisons him on war world creating a force field that is impenetrable to Mongol but of can freely pass through Green Lantern leaves while a villain vows Revenge promising to destroy all he holds dear back on Earth various super villains begin rising up against the Justice League and collectively attacking them pulling them in all different directions around the Globe the

reverse flash seizes The Flash Museum using a posy of omach and ninjas eclipso uses her magic to possess the populace of Theros Etc the Justice League Heroes set out to Vanquish each of them and an earth who is behind this sudden spike in super villain activity after twoa spent delivering beatdowns to the big bands of the DC Universe they would ultimately Trace its Origins back mongal he is used his enormous influence to distract the league from his Activities teaming up with some of the other villains while he prepared his true plan on war world he

has managed to obtain The Phantom Zone projector a device which will allow him to transport himself and War World inside the infamous prison Dimension the Guardians force field is unable to extend into The Phantom Zone which will enable him to finally escape the Justice League rushes to stop mongle but find themselves pulled into war world and forced to Compete in its games the final would have seen the heroes fighting through a series of Arenas on war world before facing Mongol as the planet and as The Phantom Zone inside he has joined by one of its

most notorious inmates General Zod who now fights alongside Mongol in exchange for his freedom in a climactic confrontation the league must procure The Phantom Zone projector and defeat the duo at all costs one successful AAS cut scene would have shown Mongol being Condemned to life imprisonment inside The Phantom Zone by the same guardian of the universe encountered earlier the Justice League gathers smoking as they watch him being forced to inhabit the same space as Zod who now pledges to spend eternity clobbering him for his failed Escape Plan according to one developer who worked on the

game the team had tried to mimic the light-hearted nature of the animated Justice League TV shows from the 2000s This is evident from some of its jokey dialogue and quirky special moves in one of them the flash can be seen starting a combo by tossing a cheeseburg up into the air and then catching it after having wailed on an enemy the tone was partly down to the fact that the George Miller movie in development was drawing inspiration from them too but also due to the game's writing staff Nar Dev elements were being overseen by the

late Dwayne McDuffy a writer who worked on Both the 2001 animated series and its followup Justice League Unlimited comic scribe Marv Wolfman whose Works include crisis on infinite Earths was also involved with the caveats that missions can be subject to bugs and balancing issues involving certain characters it is entirely possible to play the story mode from beginning to end in its last prototype build having said that some former members of double helix insist that it was still fundamentally Incomplete aside from all the Polish that had yet to be applied to it writing for the story

hadn't even been finalized meaning there was still room for it to change significantly had development been able to continue none of the cinematics were finished and the professional voice acting had yet to be recorded as a temporary solution there were many placeholder Clips voiced by The Game's Developers alongside their campaign the versus mode was shaping up To be quite robust it had 19 unique Arenas to fight in and each of the 16 playable characters had multiple skins referencing their different appearances from over the years Batman could done his look from the 1960s Adam West era

and Bizarro could be put into a tight fitting clock H disguise some of the Skins even allowed entirely different characters to become playable The Flash could be changed into Jay Garrick and Batman could be toggled into his Doppelganger bat double helix had developed all of this in little over a year they had once expected the game to release some time in 2009 but changing circumstances at Warner Brothers kept pushing it back Justice League mortal the George Miller film in development at the time was beset by issues lingering in pre-production estimated production costs for making it

in Australia balloon to High's Warner Brothers deemed Unacceptable the studio entered negotiations with the Australian government to introduce new legislation through which they would would be subject to increased tax relief in other words they hope to receive a sizable injection of cash for shooting the film in Australia these incentives would have made the Hefty price of producing it there easier for WB to swallow but the government was not able to make it happen quick enough to their liking wner Rivers decided to uproot their base in Australia and relocate the sets to Canada where they hope

to begin production soon in actuality this only served to push the proposed start of production even further into the future and did to reduce expenditure had it gone forward its production budget would have been around $300 million which would have made it one of the most expensive of all time an indecisive Warner Brother has dragged Justice League model through development hell into 2009 before finally killing the project around May there were hopes initially that double helix's game code named Justice League arcade could survive the cancellation of the movie these would soon be dashed when Warner

brers pulled the plug on the game as well in around June 2009 this isn't where the story ends though while the Justice League movie was dying a quiet behind the scenes death WB had another Big comic book movie being worked on based around Green Lantern with double helix still on board they had them Harvest code from Justice League and used it as a basis for a new Green Lantern video game to tie into this upcoming film the earliest prototypes for the Green Lantern game from August 2009 placed the hero in the themos skira level from

Justice League and had him fighting Amazonian Soldier 2 years later after much reworking the Game would be finished as Green Lantern rise of the manhunters which released in June 2011 alongside the movie starring Ryan Reynolds as the title character upon examination the game Bears a number of distinct similarities to the scrap Justice League title its progression system functions essentially the same as Justice Leagues allowing you to buy new attacks and upgrades via a store found in the menus the story mode can be played with one of a person in local Co-op again as you could

in Justice League Green lon's beat him up style combat in general isn't terribly far removed from the console game it features a number of noticeably similar mechanics to that of its Forerunner it's a vade move in particular functions identically despite being clearly based off parts of it rise of the man Hunters is much more heavily scripted it also features less content the versus multiplayer of Justice League never made A return nor did its wealth of different playable characters and alternative costumes double helix's Justice League project may not have ever been finished but efforts to preserve

what was made have since been successful video game preservationist Andrew Bowman secured builds of the game in 2015 dated only a few weeks before it was officially cancelled double helix games later went on to produce such titles as the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot the company was Acquired by Amazon in February 2014 Junction point was a game Studio founded by designer and director Warren Spectre of DSX and Thief Fame the company a subsidiary of Disney was only able to release two games Epic Mickey and its sequel however its Short History was filled with projects and ideas

that never amounted to anything project Goliath was one of these a highly ambitious pitch for a new IP the tale behind Goliath is personal one about a Small team of developers who let their imaginations run wild in search of the next great action adventure video game my guide through the twists and turns of its unusual lifespan was Alexander Ron a game designer based in New York City his experience with project Goliath began in 2010 during the sophomore year at the Savannah College for Art and Design there is definitely like a lot of sort of hurdles

that you have to cross game design is not an it's not an entry Level position it's very difficult to get in as a game designer to start out so I found out that through our school that we could actually um go to E3 as students and go for free so of course I was like absolutely I go there and I went with the a group of fellow students and you know we had a group we would go around we play a couple games we had some fun and we decided to take a tour of valet

you know we went on the subway we traveled around and we started Talking about some of the games that we saw particular limbo was one of the big games that was at the event that we were really excited for and we were having a big discussion about limbo and we noticed there's this guy kind of sitting and like you could kind of tell he was like listening in on us and and he kind of just jumps into the conversation and he's just like you know I thought limbo was pretty cool too we're just like you

know whatever this guy seems all right So we just started talking and talking and talking we started cracking jokes and he seemed to really like us and we kind of just kind of absorbed him into our group this individual would turn out to be game industry veteran Kay Hoffman Junction Point senior environment artist he had previously worked at ion storm on games like DSX and Thief deadly Shadows then you found connection to man presented Alex and his friends with unprecedented access allowing them to Mingle with known members of the industry at E3 they were introduced

by him to a number of other Junction Point staff namely Warren Spectre who was there to present Epic Mickey it wasn't until E3 was over however that the students would inch closer towards the possibility of working directly with Junction Point Hoffman kept in touch with them once the event was over and about a month later on July 7th 2010 he reached out to them with an opportunity He told them that with Junction point on the verge of completing Epic Mickey the chance would soon present itself for developers to pitch new projects to the company's management

and Disney's approval ball Klay Hoffman wanted to be at the Forefront of the next pitching season putting forward his idea for a new IP he wanted to work alongside the students in his free time to develop the concept and eventually submit a proposal if the game was green lit he promised to Bring them in to work on the project at Junction point in an official capacity so we went ahead and decided you know hey let's do this let's see where we can go if it fails I get a notch on my resume which would be

like fantastic if it goes somewhere that would be quite Splendid Hoffman's initial ideas for the project were quite vague and in need of further development but essentially revolved around a large gorilla character acting as a protector of young Children he was really fixated on the idea of just having a gorilla almost like take up the role of a stor basically delivering children and babies to different houses and it would almost be like a stealth game that was the very original Genesis of the project as the Project's ideas were expanded upon by the team they found

themselves drawing inspiration from some of their favorite 3D Platformers from around that period we were really big on Jack and Dexter And Ratchet and Clank and this was at the time Epic Mickey was out so we were pretty sure that Junction point would be very comfortable with a 3D platformer and sad to say this is kind of when the 3D platformer genre was sort of petering off aside from Epic Mickey and maybe a couple the ratchet and Clan games there really wasn't too much around in terms of just like a 3D platformer and we really

wanted to explore sort of that nostalgic feeling so we decided to uh Give the gorilla sort of a sidekick and create an entirely different story The gorilla's sidekick originally was going to be a boy named kin but that would soon change the developers decided that the sidekick being a young girl would be more interesting and more appropriate given one of the Project's key Inspirations was the original Mighty Joe Young released in 1949 Mighty Joe Young was a movie about a gorilla named Joe who is raised by a girl called jel Joe Eventually grows to an

enormous size but the two remain friends and look out for one another while Joe makes use of his brute strength to protect Jill she uses her weights and culling to save him from The Perils of captivity the dynamic between the two characters helped Inspire the relationship at the H of Goliath the two protagonists in Goliath were t the gorilla and Kai his human counterpart their differences were considerable but throughout the story They would develop an understanding and eventually a close friendship at the center of the story were underlying themes of family and belonging Kai was

a young girl who had fled her home by boat looking to escape her family with whom she has a troubled relationship her ship is ravaged by a huge unseen creature beneath the water and she finds herself stranded on an Uncharted Island as she wakes up the island Rises up out of the water and into the sky searching for Help she spots a large gorilla running into the jungle a siren sound in the background she chases after him and the two come face to face T is an oversized gorilla with cybernetic enhancements that was taken against

his will from his home planet he was brutally experimented on by his captors and augmented with special abilities including super strength the two of them come to realize that they are mutually interested in escaping the island and uncovering the True nature of their situation so they decide to team up Kai climbs aboard T's back and their adventure begins in their Journey the couple often have to fight a variety of bomic enemies including robots and other cybernetically enhanced creatures T's ample strength and skill in combat can be used to defeat some of these but not all

of them are susceptible to M melee attacks this is where the much smaller and more Nimble Kai would come in jumping down from Ty's SP to climb these goliaths and begin sabotaging them fights like these would play out in different phases for example T would initially have to attack a certain section of an enemy to expose an opening or a weak point then Kai could scale its outer shell and climb inside it the player would then switch to a section in which they guide Kai through its interior with a goal of finding a weakness some

of them would be so big that they would be comparable in size to A full level in of games once inside Kai could for instance use her engineering skills to modify the creature this would cause some of its armor plating to fall off for one of its robotic limbs to disconnect this would then allow Ty on the outside to exploit this new vulnerability sort of became this really crazy sort of tag team almost like tag team wrestling Dynamic that You' have with the duo honestly it was kind of an interesting concept I I really don't

Think I've seen anyone sort of do that their various abilities would have also been used to solve puzzles in the environment T would have been able to lift heavy objects or destroy barriers to clear the way and Kai could call upon her Arsenal high-tech ay she would have been equipped with an item known as the super tool a futuristic Swiss army knife of sorts the super tool would have had a pleora of different functions Kai could hack robots to make them fight on her Behalf similar to the pain capture mechanic from Epic Mickey it could

even shoot rods of energy into walls making rungs that would allow T to climb up walls both Kai's Tech and tar cybernetic augmentations could be enhanced as the game went on by collecting modules found in the environment Kai could then use them to engineer upgrades enabling access to new weapons and abilities the code name Goliath was chosen because the developers felt that it captured the Sense of scale they wanted players to experience as they controlled Kai the world around them was planned to be enormous and populated with creatures of increasingly intimidating size eventually the two

of them would even come across gigantic Turtle creatures with entire cities on their boxs for them to explore again we wanted to go a bit riskier because we had clay Hof and sort of vouching us and again you are given this opportunity that's so Grand You might as well go big or go home I one of the Project's big Inspirations was Shadow of the Colossus a game which was praised for its ambitious scope and presentation of large scale environments and creatures as an Enthusiast of the game Klay Hoffman demanded of the members of the team

play it to get an idea for what goliath was aiming for like Shad of the classes Goliath was intended to be an intimate emotional Story the game was said to be full of Action but the developers were adamant about it being character-driven and thematically interesting as it progressed players would have learned more about the origins of the creatures inhabiting the game setting they would have been revealed that they were handpicked from various planets throughout the Galaxy by a twisted alien villain the antagonist's experiments on them were an attempt to amass an army of technologically enhanced

creatures and Use them to do his bidding his plans were fairly straightforward but the developers wanted to create an element of Sympathy for the villain he was supposed to be the last of his rank seeking revenge against the galactic forces responsible for the eradication of his kind and as we would later find out his family one way or another Kai would need to take him down but would have wrestled with the option of Killing Him feeling sympathy for his tragic Circumstances how the story would have played out in the end was never decided this was

after all an early pitch and very far from finalized among the platforms considered were Nintendo Wii PS3 and Xbox 360 although no gameplay prototypes were ever made the developer has worked on the project in their spare time awaiting their chance to submit a pitch to Disney and hopefully work on it as the media Giant's next big video game IP but once Epic Mickey was released the Situation at Junction point was rapidly in flux that's when things got a little ugly there was a lot of tension that Klay Hoffman told me about in the company I'm

not going to go into too many details but he said it just got a little rough War inspector believe it or not is a huge huge Mickey Mouse fan his dream game was to make a Mickey game and the fact that it wasn't as well received as a lot of people had intended it had a lot of hype to it I can't even imagine How he felt that must have been very rough regardless of the criticisms leveled out various aspects of Epic Mickey none of the negativity stopped the game from being successful it ended up

being one of Disney's bestselling games of that year despite releasing on only one system looking to improve upon the first game and continue its story Junction points management decided to Pur Su a sequel with the first game performing well Disney was more than Willing to Greenlight it this meant that plans for the Goliath team to pitch that game would have to be put on hold and so we decided to sort of hold off for a little bit and potentially see if maybe we can pitch it later maybe near the end of development in the background

of Epic Mickey 2 work on the pitch quietly marched on at a steady Pace Klay Hoffman despite a hectic schedule working fulltime at Junction Point didn't give up on it he would still meet with his Fellow team members investing his free time to continue expanding upon it in November 2012 Epic Mickey 2 launched on multiple platforms around the world although it was far from the success that its developers were hoping for reviews for the title were mixed overall its reception ended up being more tepid than that of the predecessor they had once hoped to outdo

subsequently sales numbers for the game were dire according to the LA Times it sold only 270,000 Copies in North America during its first month on the market at less than a quarter of the first game's performance within that same period of time Junction Point suddenly found itself in serious trouble attempts were made in its last weeks to save the company including a pitch for a Donald Duck game Disney was ultimately unable to overlook the failure of Epic Mickey 2 the Power of Two and shut the studio down in January 2013 The Winds of Change swept

through The publisher that month as they also announced the existence of their next major undertaking Disney Infinity it kind of was terrible for us because this was events that were completely uh out of our control and that's the thing you got to realize in the game industry you have so much stuff that can go wrong especially when you're trying to get a new IP launched as Junction Point fell Goliath's prospects were looking Grim whatever its fate though the team could At least take some comfort in having a strong addition to their portfolios and being able

to tell future job interviewers about this valuable experience unfortunately for them however even this consolation was scuppered when a betrayal of trust came from someone close an artist on the team who had produce concepts for the potential game submitted some of this work to a prestigious art competition at the Savannah College of Art and Design After going through a review process the artwork was flagged up by college staff for plagiarism it was pretty much a punch to the gut for me because I I tried to defend this person I even spoke to them and I'm

just like listen how how can this be possible we work together I I know you're talented and I've seen what you did and this person basically told me that they're all out to get them you know that this was all [ __ ] you Know and I for a while believed that person and you know until I got contacted by a friend of mine who actually worked for the student council and they knew about the project that I was working on and they showed me the evidence and honestly it was probably one of the most

rough experiences of my life like just I it and I'm going to send it to you and I guess you will show the People watching this video it was heartbreaking I it just killed me I could not believe it and the problem was because of this some of the people who were involved in the project had to take their name off of it and we had some people who might or might not be quite important and all of a sudden sort of this Crown Jewel of my portfolio and sort of this project I put so

much time Into became sort of this item of contention with the school and this person eventually left in shame before they re received any sort of repercussions for their actions and from this day on whenever I showed this project I have to tell the people that this art might or might not be plagiarized and all the work that we've really put into to it just the hours just sort of this dream come true just completely shot to [ __ ] and so on top of not only just losing our opportunity to pitch this we find

out that we had one of the people that we were very trusting who I considered to be a great artist and a friend of mine just stole someone's work and in the game industry that's that's how you get on The Black List this incident was the last straw for Goliath with an indefinite amount of the r having been plagiarized they were left unable to Pitch it to Disney or any other Publishers for that matter with the exception of the aformentioned artist in question each of the students went on to land various roles in game development

Kay Hoffman on the other hand quit the game industry alt together when Junction point was shuted by Disney to work as a freelance artist and ux designer he wanted to get kids and people who are younger sort of the opportunity to prove themselves he could have had the pick of The litter he could have gone around and brought other major people on but he wanted to bring a lot of younger people on and he wanted fresh new ideas and he wanted to give young people an opportunity and a shot in the game industry and we

need more people like Kelly hman in this industry who is willing to take a risk and let young people get involved in the game industry especially those who are just starting out [Music] dirty hurry was a third person action game which was being based around the classic film license of the same name after being talked up for some time by its publisher Warner brother's interactive entertainment the game faded from the spotlight never to be seen again years later I worked to uncover the taale behind its demise and to understand more about this Infamous license Project

G Arai the first traces of of the dirty hurry video game date back to 2004 Warner Brothers had been seeking to propel dirty hurry back into relevance with a strategy set to culminate in 2007 this would have kicked off with a Dirty Harry HD DVD film collection releasing that year whereas that product was targeting older more seasoned fans of the series WB would commission a video game to attract younger audiences around June 204 they began inviting people to Pitch for the rights and share their ideas for how to use the property in the realm of

game gaming among the participants was Argonaut games the developer who was once responsible for the infamous unreleased title Star Fox 2 as well as the Croc series a couple of other Studios presented proposals but it was the collective Inc who ultimately locked down the contract they were hired to produce a dirty hry video game for Xbox 360 and PS3 shortly thereafter Warner Brothers also partnered with sensory sweep a studio in Salt Lake City Utah both developers were veterans in the field of license games while sensory sweep's involvement was never officially announced their role in the

dirty hry video game is integral to the story behind it they essentially worked on a second version of the game for other systems it was decided very early on that they would make their own game from scratch rather than Port the collectives Over it followed the same plot had similar gameplay but was an alternative approach being made primarily for less powerful systems with the exception of the PC centy sweep was set to release it on PS2 the original Xbox PC Nintendo DS and Wii there were plans for a PSP release too although it only ever

existed in the form of early design documents combined with the version by the collective that makes a total of nine different platforms that was Initially meant to launch on within the same year it was a big multi-million dollar Venture signing on Celebrity voice actors and other contributors 70s movie star Marx Julian had been brought on to write dialogue for it and Clint Eastwood was involved from the start he was set to reprise the titular role of Dirty Harry kalahan and served as a consultant for narra developments in 2005 when Warner Brothers interactive announced diry Harry

they propped him up As the face of its marketing despite this Eastwood never once actually paid a visit to the collective or any of the other game studios involved all of his feedback was brought to the table by representatives of his employed by his company Mal Paso Productions former workers of the collective said that Mal Paso was overseeing much of the production there checking in Fairly regularly when asked if Eastwood had ever provided any specific suggestions For the the story they could recall only one instance when he apparently requested Harry's Liv and dress be an

Asian woman development at the collective faced challenges from the get-go their management was insistent that the company use its own internally developed engine for the project this was a policy they adopted in 2002 as they had hoped to popularize the engine enough that other developers would pay them to use it it was first used to make A video game adaptation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and was dubbed the Slayer engine in its honor when dirty was starting out at the collective Dev kits for both the Xbox 360 and PS3 had yet to be sent out

to them the team however had deadlines to meet and therefore had to begin making the game assets regardless this might not have been such a problem had they not been expecting the new consoles to produce perfectly lifelike Graphics when the kits eventually Arrived the hardware wasn't nearly as powerful as they had been anticipating because of this they had overdeveloped their earliest assets for the game they had to tweak and redo them costing valuable time and and money this was on top of the added expenditures of modifying the Slayer engine to work with the new systems

as well according to one of its lead designers the early development environment of the PlayStation 3 baffled the collective as A result the PS3 version of dirty hurry was hardly ever started the Xbox 360 quickly became the lead development platform and the PS3 game ended up on the back burner after some setbacks by 2006 that work was starting to materialize into something resembling a playable experience The Collector game was a fairly linear shooter with Duck and Cover elements and occasional QuickTime events as well as hand toand combat for a less lethal approach when The story

demanded it Harry could also weaponize objects in his environment sometimes such as in one sequence a brawl and a bar in which he was able to fight using a pool queue after and before levels players could enter a police gun range and equip different weapons offering a break from Harry's trademark 44 magnum on the other hand sensory sweeps version at least initially was attempting to feature a bigger a variety of gameplay types there Were no fist fights or target practice like in the collective's title but there were driving sections in between the standard shooting gameplay

Harry would engage in fixed on Rails C segments a series of over-the-top action set pieces as he makes his way from One mission local to the next he could bdge them off the road by slamming into them or by firing his weapon out of the window Jason ablet was the Project's original lead designer at sensory sweep and Helped to Envision a somewhat different take on dirty hurry from the collective hun mind Jason and his team thought it unwise to try to replicate the more photorealistic graphical style of the HD counterpart on less powerful systems instead

they explored a number of more stylized abstract looks before settling on Cell shading this was partly because abet was a huge fan of the pseud 51 game killer 7 it was pitched as looking like something torn from the pages of a Graphic novel which once accepted orbe with some reluctance in the original design documents drafted by Jason abet a third style of gameplay is mentioned named investigation mode what exactly this was intended to be remains a mystery as it was never implemented and not long until the project Jason left to work elsewhere his successes were

never informed of what it was meant to be leading to it being cut to save resources Mr abet was not available for Comment as he unfortunately passed away in the years that followed his former colleagues described him as an enthusiastic presence who had high hopes for the project a few months into 2006 E3 was fast approaching but the collective game was still far from being ready for a public demonstration as a solution Warner Rivers hired amme filmworks to put together a CGI trailer using some of the collective's assets the trailer portrayed a number of Sequences

reminiscent of scenes from the original movie but kept plot details minimal since the script had yet to be finalized and Clint Eastwood had yet to record any lines for the game the video instead recycled sound bites from the film series for hurry's brief amount of dialogue The Script for the game was being penned by Kelly wand whose previous credits included several video game adaptations such as Spider-Man 2 to thanks to documents leaked to me by Former developers extensive plotty deales are now known the story was set between the first and second movies dirty hurry and

magnum force it began with hurry investigating a chain of brutal murders caused by an individual calling themselves the Gemini killer there's growing unrest among the citizens of San Francisco at the police's inability to apprehend the murderer a local Reverend Colton clay who would have been played by oor Lawrence Fishburn steps forward to lead the outpouring of criticism against the city's mayor for failing to keep the public safe later on he would have declared his bid for the mooral candidacy with the intent of taking over from him and leading San Francisco in a New Direction Harry

meanwhile delves into the dingy criminal underworld looking for answers and learns that the Gemini killer is nothing more than a pawn under the control of a shadowy Figure known as the Scarab from there Harry chases down various leads as he investigates the Scarab and their ties to the Mob to unmask this Master of Puppets throughout the story Harry is aided by a robust cast of supporting characters Leah Chen portrayed by Lucy Lou would have been his love interest a worker at the mayor's office who assists him with his investigation there were his fellow officers like

returning character Lieutenant Al Bressler whom Jean hakman had signed on to play and hurry's new partner The Feisty Maria espanosa the role of which had been given to rosn Sanchez of known actors on The Cast included Keith David Cole Hower Michael Bean Freddy Rodriguez Joseph gisi Kristen chenworth and Michael chicklas the game featured a slightly morbid running gag throughout it in which a number of Harry's partners are abruptly killed it's possible this was done in reference to the second Dirty Harry film Magnum Force in which Harry does mention that multiple partners of his have died

while in his company approaching the third act Harry interrogates an associate of the mob who alludes to the possibility of the May himself somehow being the Scarab Harry alongside Maria returns to City Hall to confront him when they arrive however they find the building Under Siege from Reapers the henchmen of the the Scarab the two detectives fight their way Inside and find that Leah Chen has vanished the May meanwhile has taken his political opponent Reverend Clay at gunpoint inside his church Harry and Maria head over there and eventually discover Marti holding a gun to Clay

as they watch on Clay's suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head before firing at Harry and Maria clay escapes getting into a limo surrounded by a convoy of armed Reapers they've also taken Leah Chen hostage it transpires That clay himself is the Scarab and that he's been perpetrating acts of terrorism around the city including the Gemini killings to weaken the mayor's foothold and gain control of the city for his own nefarious gains a car chase ensues which would have been playable in sensory sweep's version of the game and restricted to a

Cuts scene in the collectives this sequence would have ended with them pursuing Clay's Convoy over the Golden Gate Bridge at one point Harry's car rolls over a violent crash which claims Maria's life a vengeful hurry then kills Clay's rightand Man Rivers but not before before he divulges the location of that base of operations Alcatraz Harry commanders a media helicopter and flies over to the island in the last level Harry battles through a barrage of Reapers fortifying clay stronghold at the old prison inside he reaches a landing platform where he finds clay holding Le a hostage

with an Explosive belt around her chest Harry quickly shoots him sending him reeling into the helicopter behind him dropping the Detonator the two face off as clay Reigns bullets down on him from the chopper eventually Harry is able to freely of the explosive belt and H it inside Clay's helicopter a final QuickTime event would have seen Harry grab the Detonator as clay tries to taret him he activates the belt ending his reign of terror in a burst of flames In comparison with The Dirty Harry movies the video game was set to amp up the action

to the nth degree in keeping with this direction the collective version eventually gained the working title of dirty hurry extreme much of this however was never truly realized the collective was plagued by what some former developers described as a creative crisis the game struggled to break new ground it was a straightforward cover shooter that was Never able to find its unique selling point something wholly original that would help it stand out they strive to make playing as Harry feel grounded and realistic a well- intention Choice yet one that restricted them severely with what they could

do as the project ented 2007 and many of the assets for environments and characters were falling into place the designers had still yet to resolve this ex-members of the collective claim that one major issue That caused this was their lead designer apparently dismissing any and all ideas that came from outside the design team had they been successful in inventing interesting mechanics on their own terms this would have been easily forgiven but it was felt by a growing number of people within the company they had not been the downfall of the collective's Dirty Harry came towards

the start of 2007 by this point it was fairly far along a majority of the raw assets were Made and certain levels were well into prototyping such as the opening mission in in which Harry prevents a bunk Heist former developers claim that the order for cancellation came from Mal Paso Productions after checking in on the project representatives of Clint Eastwood's company weren't satisfied with the way it was progressing and revok their access to the rights Eastwood himself is said to have been determined to see it finished interested In the possibility of a new dirty har

story and the chance to revisit the role his enthusiasm for the project wasn't enough to save it however as his advisers recommended cancelling it to protect the property and that's exactly what happened it all went South right before the actor was ever able to record any of his dialogue in the final months wb's senior vice president Jace Hall and developers from monolith Productions were drafted in to help manage the Project and hopefully change its fortunes ultimately even this attempt to inject a stronger leadership wasn't enough the failure of Dirty Harry extreme caused the developer to

effectively be dismantled their parent company Foundation 9 laid off around 30 of its staffers before merging what remained with shiny entertainment forming double helix games at sensory Suite meanwhile their version of the game continued development but not for Much longer their dirty hurry was scheduled to be released around July 2007 less than 6 months away at this point and it was evident that this was a deadline they would not be able to meet this was mostly down to the fact that from the outset the company was not ideally equipped to develop for home consoles previously

they had only worked with handhelds and this meant they had to spend a lot of time building tool sets to allow them to proceed with Home Console development a designer from the project revealed that no more than 10 to 15% of the game was in even a rough playable State and that it wasn't meeting the quality standards they had set themselves former developers are quick to admit that the driving sections despite being the standout feature of their version were crudely put together one source who was a senior staff member on the title believes that had

it been released they likely would have been Dropped all together in early 2007 a meeting was chaired between Warner Brothers and key members of s sweep the two reached an understanding and reluctantly agreed that the developer wasn't quite capable of taking on a project of this scale with that wb's management shut it down the decision was partly due to the Fallout from the collectives game a domino effect of sorts without their big HD version the publisher was much less inclined to Continue it in any capacity although that reason really was just the tip of the

iceberg Focus testing conducted by Warner Brothers revealed a definite lack of appreciation for sensory sweep's art style of chice there was also the matter of just how creatively stagnant the whole project had become numerous senior employees had left over the course of development including a lead designer some former workers believe it simply passed hands a few times too many Leaving the game Meandering without a solid Direction these factors mixed with how severely far behind schedule it was spelled Doom for the last remaining form of the dirty hurry video game with a budget of around $4.1

million the loss of the contract H sensory sweep financially but it was able bble to limp on for some time after that what could have set an exciting precedent for Hollywood actors transitioning into video games instead humbled each Studio It touched former workers of both sensory sweep and the collective say that the game always had the potential to be something special but even they admit the wrong companies were chosen for the task the outcome was years of development Rife with problems leaving us with nothing more than one of the more Infamous cases of Cel video

games Z games was a game Studio based in Sweden known for such titles as lost in Random flipping death and Fay it was in November 2009 that the company briefly captured the imagination of Nintendo Wii owners with an ambitious proof of concept for a title aimed primarily at children the video showed a game controlled by inserting a Wii remote into a specially designed plush toy and moving it about in various ways that demo called caught the attention of the games media and subsequently fans of the Wii who expressed an interest in this Novel concept as

the years went by however the game known as we were never materialized and the truth surrounding its fate remained unclear to shed some light on the topic I spoke to zoink president Claus linget who disclosed we's behind thescene story and how its planned release was derailed by factors beyond their control clous lingel Ed's involvement in the games industry began in the 1990s when He worked as a freelance artist on various projects before eventually joining shiny entertainment in 1997 shortly after the turn of the century during early work on Enter the Matrix clouse was growing weary

of traditional game development and departed shiny of his own a court his research into the possibility of opening his own studio in the US didn't get far as he encountered a number of potential roadblocks such as Visa complications With that in mind he left the country entirely in 2001 returning to his native Sweden to start over and form a new limited company named Zink this was envisioned by him as an independent game Studio that would serve as his primary creative Outlet Z's early attempts at game development fa difficulties of their own however their first major

project was the Kang an original 3D action Venture game for Xbox which was given the green light to production by Unique game development Studios but when financial troubles hit the publisher in 2004 UDC declared bankruptcy hurling zink's debut title into uncertainty burned by the instability and unpredictability of game creation klouse decided to Pivot Z into the animation industry there he and the rest of the company would find success picking up work for Brands such as Burger King and cocacola it wasn't until later into the decade that zink's founder would ReDiscover his creative spark for the

interactive medium with the Advent of the Nintendo Wii its unique controller opened up many new possibilities for clous and his team prospects made only more enticing by a gold rush of companies cashing in on its burgeoning success a small German startup named pixon stepped up to pay for the remainder of the cor gang's development Reviving it for the Wii in 2008 it was during work on this unlikely Resurrection that klous began to conceptualize his next original Ip after becoming a father in the mid 2000s clouse Drew inspiration for his next game from observing the behavior

of his young son I remember he was very young you know he's like 4 five or something like that and I remember he was always playing he we would play the games together and then he would go off and then he would continue playing the games but with his uh with his toys in his Room you know and it was just funny to see how he uh just continue the video game but with puppets instead you know or with with his dolls and his uh his teddy bears and stuff like that you know so we

basically I was looking at him how he was playing and how he's just animating the character around jumping around with him and I think that Wei were playing Wii games at that point too and and I just thought it was funny how like um how you you could actually Puppeteer like the way you bounce around with your carriage and with your hand like pretending that is jumping around you know and then I was realizing wow that's kind of cool I mean that's how you would actually animate the character uh in the game with the Wii

controller and then it was also I clicked oh cool I could actually put what if I put the wi mode inside one of his um inside one of his plush toys you know and so was born the idea behind what would come to be Known as Wei were which CLA started to pursue in early 2008 he approached Nordic game Ventures an investment group that provides financing to Independent game projects from Nordic countries his pitch to them by all accounts made an impression and Zink was quickly granted funding of around $30,000 in Spring 2008 while this

was not enough to pay for the development of a full game it allowed the project to get off the ground the team began fleshing out The concept commissioning prototype plush toys and starting work on a game demo a key source of inspiration for them in the process of realizing its world and characters was the clation adventure game the neverhood this can be observed from the appearance of the titula main character wewa which has some similarities to the ne Hood's prot IST Clayman the original plush for the game however featured a different design according tolouse players

were once Intended to insert the wi remotes into its nose with the tip of the controller protruding out slightly this would have enabled players to use the remotes infrared pointer to interact with the game but the concept was quickly abandoned after testing we tested it on kids and we saw kids were just grabbing it and they would just slam it in the floor and of course the because the the remote wasn't protected they would actually break the we mode so we decide Okay we really need to put it inside so it's very protected you know

the structure of the title was that of an adventure game with a variety of mini games encountered along the journey the toy could be stood up right on the floor and the player would have to wobble them left and right to Waddle wewa down fixed Pathways in the game many games or alternate routes could be encountered regularly and the player would gesture the toy EV upside down on its side to Select them Z experimented extensively finding the strengths and weaknesses of the Wii remote's motion senses to narrow down what was really possible it's because of

that that the plush tie opened the door to modes of interactivity that usually went unexplored with the lone we remote for instance the player could bounce the creature up and down by grabbing onto its springy ears Z had developed ways of determining the length of the Bounce by Measuring the remote's accelerometer these ideas were pushed even further by a gameplay concept that had the player through throwing the toy upwards when the remote was tossed into the air Claus told me its accelerometer position would Return To Zero meaning zo could detect how long the plush was

Airborne for and build a mini game around just that players would toss the character upwards and the game would replicate this challenging them to time their throws to Collect items in the sky in another miname wew sneak into a cave inhabited by a dangerous monster trying to sleep in order to steal his treasure players would hold the too right to cause the character to sneak forwards deeper into his lair but every so often the creature would break from his Slumber the player would have to then quickly lay wewa face down which would make the in-game

character go prone and avoid alerting the enemy the game was also planned to Feature a unique physical reward system reminiscent of a Scout club a set of pins was going to be included in the box and upon reaching a certain milestone in the game players would be prompted to attach a particular pin to their wiiw plug as a reward this was a way for players to show their progress without having to open the game up and offered a degree of self expression as to where they were placed on the toy during our talks CLA Shared

that he had originally hoped we were would be able to reach people of all ages with an appeal he likened to that of animal crossings however It ultimately ended up targeting younger audiences when Z realized how basic the motion controls in the Wii remote were which limited how complex the gameplay could be implementation of Nintendo's Motion Plus add-on for the remote was fleetingly considered but was abandoned out of concerns this would limit their Potential Market while wew didn't end up as adult oriented as once intended klous did invent another Wii game concept to fill that

viid balls of flurry was his attempt to create a party game for grown-ups using similar ideas to Wei were players would have inserted the Wii remote into a ball and tossed it through the air to one another as they participated in various mini games in one for example the ball was a time bomb waiting to explode and players would Have to pass it between them to avoid it ticking could be heard via the Wii remote speaker before an eventual explosion sound Z's hopes for the game were deflated however after the pitch was shown to Nintendo

who told them it was simply too dangerous to be made between early 2008 and February 2009 the Wei were project made significant progress according to Andis senson its lead programmer it was then that the team was finally able to secure a Publishing deal American publisher majesco known for releasing such titles as Psychonauts and blood rain signed with Z to bring wewa to markets around the world but Jesco was seen as a good fit for the game due to their connections with major US retailers like Walmart since the game hinged upon a physical component the soft

toy being able to negotiate with retail chain for stor space was viewed as an essential asset in the 5 months that followed the Start of their partnership with mesco the game quietly continued to make strides behind the scenes but sink was about to have their plans upended by an unexpected rival at the time one of the games majesco was best known for publishing was cooking mama the franchise had expanded rapidly over the years well beyond its humble beginnings as a DS game to have multiple sequels and spin-offs it just so happened that Mama's next outing

for the Wii was set to have her entering the daycare business and this entailed a physical stuffed tie of a baby players would control by inserting the Wii remote into for wewa it was an unfortunate coincidence two games plan to be released around the same time with very similar Core Concepts by the same publisher P Jesco was faced with a choice between Z original Ip or a spin-off to an already successful series With manufacturing costs taken into account the publisher was unwilling to keep both going and chose to release Babysitting Mama instead miwa support was

abruptly cut off in August 200 2009 leaving Z scrambling to find a new publishing partner the company decided to widen their search by going public they got to work assembling a trailer for the game designed to grab the attention of players and Publishers along like the video was released on Their website in early November 2009 and soon got the games media talking but not entirely for the reasons they had hoped the original version of the trailer they posted showed the child player demonstrating how to insert the we remote via the bottom of the soft toy

this immediately garnered some derisive remarks from the Press who mocked the clip with sexually suggestive jokes Kotaku is among the first to partake in this with their headline we were let we Owners penetrate play with bbits within hours of the trailer dropping it was swiftly pulled and replaced with an alternate take showing the remote instead being pushed inside the Toy's mouth the response thereafter was largely one of intrigue and enthusiasm and the joke soon subsided for the most part up until now the original trailer was considered lost media but I was able to obtain a

copy of it during my research the second version of the video Gained around 180,000 views within a couple of months and eventually did lead Zink to finding a distributor willing to take the game on according tolouse we was bumpy road to release wasn't over yet however one major barrier the project run into during development was getting approval from Nintendo their strict rules for games with controller add-ons were such that if a developer created a game for the Wii which required the associated peripheral they Would need to personally inspect both clous feared that this process had

the potential a drag out for a very long period of time and could ultimately risk the whole Venture if Nintendo rejected it to avoid this entirely Z argued that the game could be played without the tie they also Drew plans to sell the tie as a separate item to the game but have the two placed next to each other on store shelves the two combined were expected to be priced around $40 that wasn't the only tinkering done to avoid Nintendo's wrath the name of the game was changed mid development to well with two e when

Z realized that Nintendo likely wouldn't have permitted them to use the Wii name in their title for a time things were looking promising production plans for the plush toys were being drawn up retailers were being CED and that's not all we were actually in the process of submitting the final build to Nintendo so that means if you Understand this basically means we had the game was totally finished really yes the game was all finished but uh we were we were sending it into Nintendo and we getting it approved by Nintendo which take a long it

can sometimes take a long time because they need to look at it and they need to find all the bugs and all that sort of stuff so so we had build the whole game a potential 2010 launch for the game briefly seemed on the cards but yet more disappointment lay ahead For the developers the prospective deal with that chosen distributor fell through in early 2010 according to lead programmer and his Fenson their reasoning for exiting negotiations with Z was hard for klous to argue with the Wii game Market had seen a sizable downturn from its

dizzying Heights towards the start of the console's life a pattern was emerging first party games were selling third party games largely performed much worse enough thirdparty Software was struggling to find an audience on Nintendo system for Publishers to take notice and become increasingly hesitant about developing for it I think a lot of people who bought the original Wii really just bought it for Wii Sports and they were really like oh that's the that's all there is it's almost like buying the tennis game and that's it and then they so they bought a lot of consoles

but there wasn't a lot of people buying Actual titles with Publisher confidence in the Wii plummeting Wii wasn't aable to land back on its feet a version of the game for Xbox 360 using connect was discussed with Microsoft but the market wasn't deemed big enough for it to be considered viable many other Publishers were contacted in the search for funding including Ubisoft clouse revealed that they had shown an interest in the concept but wanted to turn it into a game using Rabids instead a concession he was unwilling to make since he wanted it to be

in newp did you ever consider going straight to Nintendo themselves and you know trying to pitch it to them oh yeah we tried we tried it was impossible impossible to even get the right person and and you have to think about it like Nintendo is controlled by Japan you know um if you want to talk to somebody in Europe or I mean I'm in Sweden so if you had to talk to anybody In Europe you have to talk to the guys that in Germany I think it's easier now but at that time it was really

they were very scared about releasing any kind of content like that too because they had problems with people throwing the remotes inside the TV screen and it was quite new for them too getting it through Nintendo would have taken them so long that it would be almost impossible you know and maybe not get it through at all I think it's very hard to Do anything with Nintendo Nintendo are it's easy to release nindi or a game today but if I think if you want to do anything outside the system like these ideas I think it's

very hard even today we've thought about like oh should we should we bring back WEA and maybe do it for the the switch you know because I mean the controls are small as could even have a small plush toy which would be kind of cute it could even be like a little maybe it's like a little squishy Kind of doll instead of being actually a plush toy you know something like that mhm but at the moment we're just like anything that has to distribute real objects is super complicated you know so cut their losses in

2010 and moved on to other projects that was until 2 years later when the studio began to take an interest in mobile platforms they became registered Developers for Apple's IOS and the possibility of a Wei Revival arose while the developers wouldn't be Able to realize their original plans of a plush toy centered game the decision was made to take advantage of the large amount of work done on the software and reuse what they could the results was we rock on an action title for phones and tablets that recycled the art assets made for the Wii

edition Gone were the mini games of old replaced with simple linear levels where wewa flings enemies Away by shooting lightning out of a magic guitar players would now amass Coins as they played which could be spent in an item store to customize their character Z joined forces with Publisher UI entertainment to bring the game over the finish line and it finally saw the light of day in December 2012 two versions of the app were released one was a free game with ads the other a premium ad free experience for 99 while it didn't make as

many waves online as the original version did we while rockon went on to be fairly successful According tolouse it was by all accounts well liked reviewers praised its gameplay colorful visuals and musical score by synth musician kku following close to 5 years of on andof development Zink was finally able to release their work but the idea of a plush toy game continued to linger on for some time after that CLA shared that he had given some thought about attempting a Wii U version via crowdfunding but the system's commercial failure cautioned Him against it further considerations

were made for Nintendo's handheld at the time the 3DS clous experimented with the device creating a plush toy into which the handheld could be inserted to form an interactive experience he likened to a tamagachi this however never went on to become a full game the original wew never saw an official release but the creativity that went into it is something clous remains proud of it was very inventive project I'm still very Proud of it you know I thought it was a very smart and sometimes when we talk to other Publishers or developers or talking to

somebody about think it's kind of cool to show them that you know mhm also it's it's part of the history of zoink you know even though it didn't get out it's still a really inventive and very fun project and uh it kind of shows how we are sometimes to do something very different you know we while rockon was automatically delisted From App Stores a few years after launch as Z declined to update it for new devices the company went on to have numerous successful titles in the following years including sticker to the man Fay and

lost in random they eventually merged with steam World creators image and form in 2017 to become thunderful games that