GAMES YOU'LL NEVER SEE PT1
I was just going through my old hard-drive and tidying up some things, and stumbled across my portfolio of computer graphics work. There’s a ton of it, from 12 years working as a computer games artist and designer.
The last three or four years I worked mainly in designing and rapid-prototyping game proposals. It was a small team, me and a programmer…and our job, well…it doesn’t get much better than this really, our job was to think up really cool ideas for games, and speedily produce a quick, vaguely playable sample of it. That would then be taken to a big game publisher and we’d pitch the idea to them.
So I thought, it might be interesting to any readers out there who do partake in a little gaming to see images of some games that oh-so-nearly went into full production, but for some reason didn’t. Who knows, any one of these games might just have gone on to become a huge hit, another Assassins Creed, another Call of Duty, another Halo.
These three images were from a proposal based on the old 70’s movie WestWorld. The movie was based on the idea of a holiday vacation world populated by robots that you could safely ‘kill’ for fun. But…as is always the case with disaster movies, something went wrong and damaged their circuits and made the robots turn on their guests. Great film! And a good starting point for a game idea. So, we designed a game where you play a maintenance tech guy armed with some gadgetry, whose task it was to rescue theme park guests whilst fighting all manner of robotic foes from different history theme zones; gunslingers, knights, orc, dragons, aliens. We had some cool zones like ‘Horror Zone’ and ‘History Zone’ and ‘Movie Zone’ (movie zone was cool, because there’d be loads of vaguely recogniseable cameos…eg: Laurel and Hardy robots, Terminator robots etc etc).
Anyway, I knocked up a some damaged cowboy robots models some maintenance bunkers and drafted in some extra artists to hastily throw together a wild west street and my programmer partner wrote enough code that you could wander around have a simple gun fight with them….and quite a cool gimmick of the game – target a robot and directly control it, for a limited time only. (The yellowy image shows what you’d see from the eyes of a controlled robot). That was basically the cool gimmick – controlling anything from robot rats to robot dragons.
We pitched it, and this one, nearly….oh so nearly got greenlit but the publisher in question finally declined.
Sigh
Anyway…I’ll post another screenshot from a game that never got made soon.
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said... Westworld...not sure if i should hate you for making me feel old or thank you for remiding me of the film...i did like like that film...i think a game would have been fun. Did you ever work for a living...LOL!!
said... Cheeky monkey.
said... I would've liked that game