I dont know alot about gaming history but I enjoy finding out about alternate paths and dead ends. Its a commonplace but that feeling of “a nintendo playstation??? WHAAT??” i think is just sort of cool, when you first read about it.
I think its something about realising the surprisingly haphazard nature of Important Business Decisions. The actual playstation just fit into the whole early 2000’s minidisc new millenium clean futurism deal that i dont think i was alone in believeing i was playing a very wisely and deliberately concieved gamez machine at the time. I love the contrast of this with the actual history, nintendos deal with samsung that was a surprise even to sony, just the weird happenstance of it. Also the N64 was so fucking nintendo that how could things have been any different? But they almost were.
So Sb, what are your favourite abandoned projects, plans, partnerships, campaigns or software of gaming history? Plz to include speculative things That We May Never Know.
there were apparently plans at some point for a guitar hero-like game on the mega cd. imagine if that had happened, had been a similar success like guitar hero was when it arrived, and caused the mega cd to become a mainstream machine.
what if nec hadn’t gone insane and there were actual games on the pc-fx? given time, and more interest from developers, it could have had better 2d graphics than the saturn, and it could have been the default home console for arcade ports.
imagine if the plans to integrate dreamcast technology into dvd players and digital tv receivers had gone through, and there were several dreamcasts in every home. that kind of saturation would be hard to compete with, and maybe even hard to replace. it’d be a difficult situation around the mid-00s.
what if the prevalance of piracy on the playstation caused console manufacturers to abandon optical media and go back to cartridges? either the presentation of games would have been very different for a few years while storage media caught up, or storage media would have developed at a much faster rate.
I mostly wonder how things would’ve evolved if certain keystone genre creating games were cut right out of game history. The Miyamoto canon are the biggest candidates, also Dragon Quest, Doom and Dune 2. Looking back even further, what if Dungeons and Dragons and pinball never existed?
I want to say that as long as the technology and social/business substrate is there, all of the same basic mechanics would’ve arisen anyway. But the genre boundaries wouldn’t be cut in the exact same places and the detailed conventions would be alien to us. Some games that we consider strange and obscure like Wonder Boy in Monster Land or System Shock would’ve been the keystones, and then every platformer would have invisible coins and every FPS would have attritional limited ammo and a gun repair system.
What if NEC didn’t completely botch the design of the Turbografx and they actually released good games in the US? Imagine if the Turbografx actually outsold the Genesis in the US the way it did in Japan.
The one I always come back to thinking about when it comes to lineages that got cut off was, well, how EA bought Origin and effectively killed Ultima.
The Ultima series is still drastically different from most modern western RPGs, which are mostly dominated by Bethesda related games or Baldur’s Gate derivatives.
Ultima Underworld is probably the closest lineage to one that got a followup, via Arx Fatalis, but still kind of dead ended.
“EA killed ultima” sounds bogus to me. EA canceled Ultima seven years after the purchase because sales started underperforming. Let’s say EA had never bought Origin, then the independent company would’ve likely gone broke instead. It seems the playerbase decided Ultima should die.
As opposed to the attitude that 90s EA ruined everything it touched? I’m pushing back on the reductionism of that. Obviously if EA hadn’t bought them then Ultima would’ve evolved differently yada yada and the outcome would be different, but that difference ranges from series survival to more or less neutral to died off even faster, and I don’t see the argument why it would be more biased towards survival.
It was underperforming because the series got torpedoed by EA’s need to turn everything into a product of ‘what’s popular’
were fans of the previous ultima games seriously asking for U8 to be a party-less single character game with jumping puzzles? honest question. i am betting the answer is ‘hell no.’ it was also rushed and unfinished. u9 was mismanaged all the way through and basically does not exist.
warren spector also bailed in that era.
ultima online became the franchise, essentially
(edit: fun fact: EA bought Origin during the tail end of U7’s development. U7’s story is essentially a metaphor for being bought by EA; The Guardian’s three prisms combine to make the shape of EA’s logo of the time. The primary villains are E & A. etc.)
you can read sierra’s old inter-action magazine and see steam is basically on the tip of ken williams tongue but the infrastructure for it doesn’t exist in 1994. he also goes on about his hopes for the future of educational games, recreating historical worlds that kids in class rooms can go through, trying to think how multiplayer might work for adventure games etc.
would of been nice if ultima online had been the big hit instead of everquest and we could of got an mmo genre actually about shared online worlds, not single player story based western rpgs with the numbers padded out and multiplayer barely more involved than a souls game, except that you have to pay a monthly fee for some reason.
I think if you trace MMO design back to MUDs Everquest’s popularity makes sense – the DikuMuds Everquest pulls from were vastly more popular than roleplaying ones. Those brave heroes building Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies (and my dear departed squidman with his robot shop on the Corellian river) were gambling that immersive graphics would bring in a different audience. The hype for Second Life probably fueled this.
I think as WoW proved, a much, much bigger MMO audience has a roughly similar composition of tastes as the nerdier subset of the late '90s and the earlier MUD subset: give me combat, give me quests, give me social presence, in that order.
MMOs being based on derivatives of Diku was kind of inevitable, yeah. There just weren’t enough people interested.
Though, I’ve wondered for a long time if there’s a market for an MMO with a Paid Storywriting Service where you can pay to effectively have a gamemaster create and manage a story for you and your friends. Obviously couldn’t do much in terms of assets, but I think there’d be at least a few people willing to spend money on it.
Systematic story worlds kind of die by the nature of just being too much of a videogame in the end; the players who want to play it like a videogame will straight up try to undermine everything you try to do.
Ooh, do you think the developers of King’s Field played realtime dungeon crawlers (Eye of the Beholder leading to Ultima Underworld leading to…)?
The picture I had in my head (informed only by speculation and FM-TOWNS MARTY screenshots) was that the PC-based, turn-based dungeon crawler imported with Wizardry was iterated on up through games like Shin Megami Tensei; with PlayStation cheap 3D graphics gave a quick push to ‘realtime combat’. Support evidence for that theory includes: they were so bad at combat, contrary, From has always been idiosyncratic and stiff controls are very Japan-PS1-idiosyncratic.
** A WILD TANGENT APPROACHES! **
Does anyone know why uptake on analog movement was so slow among Japanese games? Even at the end of the PS2’s life, when every game used the sticks, a ton of Japanese games have clearly digital movement states underneath.
UUW came out on the FM-TOWNS MARTY in japanese only one year after its pc release. I imagine, if you are developing a first person 3d real time dungeon crawl you would at least be aware of the immediate antecedent to your game.
