Tag: Canceled Games

Bite-Sized Game History: Early Box Art for Zelda and Punch-Out!!, Marketing Marvel Vs Capcom Origins, and Jurassic World’s Secret Origin

Like with any creative endeavor, actually completing development of a video game is only half the battle. The other half involves getting eyeballs in front of your completed game and getting these new fans to (hopefully) tell their friends all about it.

Game publishers have tried lots of different marketing methods over the years, and we look at two of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as what happens when you need to pitch your game to the most famous film director in the world.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Final Footage of Star Wars 1313, Sony Acquires Bungie, and Ninendo Announces End of 3DS/Wii U eShop

Get a bunch of video game fans in a room, and they’ll gladly talk your ear off about all the ones that got away. Games that hooked us right from the first announcement and then just withered away in development hell. I know it’ll never happen, but I still hold out hope that Capcom will revive Maximo 3 someday. I mean the first two were so fun…

Anyway, for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s talk about a few games, developers, and online storefronts that got away…

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Three Mini-Documentaries for Mario Day

It’s March 10th, which can also be written as MAR-10, which means that it’s Mario Day, an annual celebration of Nintendo’s mustachioed plumber.

Like Disney and Star Wars Day, the consolemaker has embraced this fan-driven holiday, and it’s likely that some kind of major announcement will happen later today (the smart money is on the first trailer for the upcoming Super Bros. Mario movie).

But you need to get into the proper headspace to truly enjoy the holiday, so sit back and enjoy this trio of mini-documentaries about the man they call Mario.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Tennis For Two Recreated, Power Rangers: Project Nomad Exposed, and Shaggy’s Mortal Kombat Debut

It’s an oft-repeated mantra in certain circles (and I’m sure it’s come up in this column before), but game development is hard. Projects morph and mutate as they wind their way through development, and many never make it out the other side. So for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at a few things that disappeared over the years, but still live on in their own way…

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Bite-Sized Game History: Independence Day Online, Lucasfilm Games’s Founding, and Superman: Blue Steel

LucasArts and Factor 5 were joined at the hip in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But what sorts of games did LucasArts create before their collaboration? And what happened to Factor 5 after the Rogue Squadron series faltered? Oh, and where does the long-forgotten Independence Day Online fit in with both companies?

Find out in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…

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Play Ball: Nintendo and the Mariners, Midway’s Lost “MLB Jam,” and Don Daglow’s Baseball Sim

Sony’s MLB: The Show franchise offers an incredible facsimile of America’s Pastime, but with Opening Day upon us, I find myself instead gravitating towards my NES and Super NES shelves to replay old favorites like Jaleco’s Bases Loaded, Konami’s Base Wars, and Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.

Nintendo didn’t have to look very far to find a spokesman for the Super NES game… Griffey and the rest of the Mariners were actually already on the payroll. Even though he didn’t care for the sport, CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi purchased the baseball team in 1992 and owned it until his death in 2013.

But Yamauchi’s tenure at the head of the Mariners organization did more than help produce a handful of great Super NES and N64 games, it also upended one of Major League Baseball’s longstanding traditions.

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Game History Secrets Uncovers the WorkBoy, The Simpsons: Hit & Run 2, and This Is Vegas

Liam Robertson was very busy this past year. The journalist produced multiple new videos for his Game History Secrets series, uncovering the facts about unreleased passion projects such as the fabled WorkBoy peripheral, Midway’s This Is Vegas, and Radical Entertainment’s The Simpsons: Hit & Run 2.

While the latter two games share a common lineage with Rockstar’s explosive Grand Theft Auto franchise, the discovery of the WorkBoy is no less exciting. So let’s travel back in time and learn more about two massive open-world adventures and an organizer for your Game Boy.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Nintendo Power Survives Dragon Warrior, Doom’s Shareware Secrets, and Dirty Harry’s Bizarre Announcement

When you’re working with video games, you have to learn to be adaptable. In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we look at adapting in the face of a flop, adapting when you have a blockbuster fall in your lap, and adapting to the reality of creating game adaptations.

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Bite-Sized Game History: John Tobias Gets Started, The Simpsons Go Medieval, and Some CES 1994 Swag

Everybody has to get their start somewhere.

For a lot of developers, that start often comes from an opportunity that’s slightly outside the game industry. But even after they’ve been at it for a few decades, some veteran designers need to get to a place where they can restart. And you can’t have a beginning without something else ending, like the game industry’s transition from CES to E3 in 1994-1995.

We’ll talk about all of these scenarios in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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Bite-Sized Game History: PlayStation’s First Mascot, Happy Gilmore: The Game, and Why Every Arcade Game Used the Same Font in the 90s

The PlayStation is 25! So let’s take a trip back to 1995 and the console’s debut at the E3 Expo in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

We’ll also get a chance to talk about another mid-90s mainstay, Adam Sandler, and a funky font choice that popped up a lot in arcade games from the era.

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