
Because we delight in rubbing your face with the Wire Brush of Disappointment, here are ten of the best games that never came to be.
Please remember this: you will never, ever, ever play any of these games. Aaaaand... cue the weeping!
Reportedly due to focus on bounty hunter Boba Fett - and produced with direct involvement from George Lucas (always a guarantee of quality, unless you count 60% of everything he's ever done) - it was set amid the lower levels of the planet Coruscant, and utilised material from the canned Star Wars live-action TV series. The promise that LucasArts might've finally been giving everyone the Star Wars game they've wanted since Dark Forces makes this one of the more painful never-weres on this list.
Fortunately, there is another new Star Wars action-adventure in the works, that apparently picks up some of the threads of 1313. It's being overseen by Naughty Dog veteran Amy Hennig, and is "in the style of Uncharted", according to Uncharted actor Nolan "Every Voice" North.
Being put together by the team behind the peerless side-scrolling shooter Robocop Vs Terminator, it followed much the same style, albeit revolving around a futuristic, Running Man-style gameshow where contestants slaughtered one another for readies.
Suffice to say, the hyper violent, murder-for-money, content helped put paid to its chances of getting a release. We remember it looking very, very lovely, mind. But then, we were drunk on our own good fortune at the time. Freebie trips to America? Pfft. Like that ever happened again...
Frankly, early footage never looked that promising - blocky and confusing, compared to Mario 64's smooth curves - but the wrongly curious can now play a salvaged version of the game online.
Demos of the axed attempts can be found on Elite co-creator Ian Bell's homepage.
The P.T. - Playable Trailer - released in 2014, and starring Mumbles out of The Walking Dead, promised much. The fact it was downloaded over a million times suggests the game would've been a sizeable hit... so you can only imagine the scale of the tiff between Kojima and Konami. Perhaps he left a bowl of coal and sick in their corporate fridge, or something.
As did the father of one fallen British soldier, who said: "These horrific events should be confined to the annals of history, not trivialized and rendered for thrill-seekers to play out... It's entirely possible that Muslim families will buy the game, and for them it may prove particularly harrowing. Even worse, it could end up in the hands of a fanatical young Muslim and incite him to consider some form of retaliation or retribution."
Unfortunately, he could've been talking about any number of modern video games, which might suggest he'd stoked-up by... oh, of course... The Daily Mail... just to stir up some controversy in the pursuit of a story. Nevertheless, it was all too much for publisher Konami, who pulled the plug. Which was a shame, as the game's intent - so it seems - was intended to honour and explore everyone affected by the Iraq conflict, and had been put together with surprising stab at sensitivity.
Speaking to Joystiq, Atomic Games' president Peter Tamte trilled: "It's important for us to say, you know, that there are actually three communities that are very affected by the battle for Fallujah. Certainly the Marines. Certainly the Iraqi civilians within Fallujah, and the insurgents as well. We are actually getting contributions from all three of those communities so that we can get the kind of insight we're trying to get."
As always with Molyneux, the action-based strategy shindig at least sounded great - helping tribes to evolve, while fighting off dinosaurs and that. However, after Molyneux heaped lashings of hype onto the game, it was cancelled with a simple statement on the Lionhead Studios website, announcing that members of the B.C. team were being moved to other projects. B.C.? More like B.S...! High-five.
Reasons for its cancellation are unclear - Warner Bros. shut down the game before its scheduled 2007 release, and moved team members onto other projects. Did they feel lucky, punk? No they did not feel lucky, punk.
Part of a three-game, 2007 deal with Electronic Arts (which also produced, er, Boom Blox and Boom Blox Bash), Spielberg's aim with LMNO was to produce a game that evoked emotion in a player, based around their relationship with an extra-terrestrial (sound familiar?) named Eve. It was set to be a mix of first-person parkour platforming (think Mirror's Edge) with RPG-like overtones.
The game was actually cancelled twice - undergoing a complete overhaul after the first cancellation, and being retitled The Escape Artist - before EA pulled the plug in 2009, once and for all. Steven!