Your Daily McMaster: five games I almost played

Like movies and television, videogames have their fair share of products that didn’t quite make it to the audience. Like Jerry Lewis’ movie about a clown that leads children to the gas chamber in a concentration camp, many games have been cancelled and forgotten. Let’s take a quick look at what we might have played had things turned out differently.

After the jump, the world could have been a very different place

1) Duelin’ Firemen

Duelin’ Fireman was slated to be a 3D0 game chock full of full motion video, featuring an interesting cast list. Set in a skyscraper burning to the ground, the game featured a slew of crazy cameos including Mark Mothersbaugh, Tony Hawk, and Steve Albini. The only remaining evidence of the game is a rather long preview video. Enjoy!

2) Starcraft: Ghost

Starcraft was a really big hit. So big a hit that Blizzard wanted to spin off one of the units into its own stealth game. What’s not to like about a hot lady assassin wearing skin-tight body armor? I dunno, but for some reason Blizzard cancelled the project years ago. Check out the opening cinematic.

3) Titan

A few years ago an internal document from Blizzard was leaked. It included the stuff you’d expect to see: Diablo, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft expansions dotted the landscape of the development road map, but one thing stuck out. Something named “Titan.” Speculation began immediately, with the smart money landing on a new MMO from the official leader of the genre. Then… nothing. Earlier this year, Blizzard let the team go and put the project on hold.

4) Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans

Lets take a trip to Azeroth. Back before Blizzard were the kings of the world and everyone immediately bought anything they released, they were just a strategy game company. Attempting to branch out from the RTS genre, Blizzard looked at the then-popular adventure game arena ruled by LucasArts and Sierra. They came up with Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, the story of Thrall. The game went into development and had a good amount of work completed before being scrapped. There was even a trailer.

5) Power Crystal

The game on this list that personally haunts me is Power Crystal. It was planned for the unreleased Panasonic M2 as the new console’s answer to Zelda. It was never released. It was supposed to be similar to the Elder Scrolls games, but with cooler features. Each house was explorable and it had a huge open world. The thought of being able to creep through this world and go wherever I wanted was too much for teenage Jason to handle. I resolved that, no matter what, I’d own the M2 and a copy of the game. That never came to pass. While the other big title, D2, went on to find a home on the Dreamcast (though substantially different from the original version), Power Crystal went away. Here are a few screenshots from the game’s development.

These are only a handful of examples of what is a giant list of unreleased games. Which games that never saw the light of day did you want?