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They may have looked impressive at the early stages, but sometimes even the most promising of games don't make it out of the tricky development process. We've swept the cutting room floor to bring you the greatest binned PlayStation games that died in teasing, tantalising, sometimes super-sad style.
WWE Brawl
Street Fighter meets Super Smash Bros... if Ryu and Mario had both been AA’ed through tables. That was the basic premise for this bicep-heavy grappler. A platformer/beat-‘em-up hybrid, it centred around Cena and co. trying to stop Vince McMahon’s schemes. Despite its quirky art style, Brawl was canned in 2012, not long before publisher THQ went under.
Killing Day
Or ‘The One With The Really Sexy Marble Textures’. Another failed child of (whisper it) E3 ‘05, this Ubi shooter rocked sultry destructible scenery. Very little was ever mentioned of K-Day after this and, in the fullness of time, it looks like it was merely a briefly impressive slice of target footage to hype folk for PS3.
Faith and a .45
A Bonnie And Clyde-inspired co-op shooter, set during the Great Depression, starring outlaw lovers Luke and Ruby. It was slated for PS3, but when dev Deadline Games’ episodic Watchmen series tanked, the duo were taken out back. And here we were thinking Bonnie And Clyde had a happy ending.
Harker
Bloody vampires. They come here, they take our jobs, suck our arteries dry, then don’t even have the decency to nail down a release date. Harker was a vamp-hunter dreamt up by The Collective, a studio that cut its fangs on PS2’s Buffy titles. Luckily for Drac, Harker was cancelled after The Collective merged with Shiny Entertainment.
100 Bullets
Screw ammo. Want to deal a game a real deathblow? Just have its publisher go belly up. PS2’s take on Brian Azzarello’s comic may have sported an inventive shooting system built around a rage meter and using hostages as shields, but it couldn’t survive the financial woes that saw Acclaim die back in 2004.
This Is Vegas
This debauched PS3 open world was set to let you build an empire... not through gambling, but by fighting and partying, naturally. Once owned by Midway, it was sold to Warner Bros in ‘09, then canned due to spiralling losses that saw both publishers lose a combined $50m. Whatever happened in this Sin City sandbox, it’ll have to stay there.
Star Wars 1313
God, this one still hurts more than watching a night of Jar Jar-funded amateur theatre. Influenced by Uncharted and running on Unreal Engine 3, 1313 looked like it could be the Star Wars game. Then LucasArts got bought by Disney and the latter decided it would rather focus on making mobile games. Sith truly does happen.
The Getaway 3
Are you mugging me off, sunshine? After wowing the world with its Piccadilly Circus demo at 2005’s E3 – a showing meant to highlight PS3’s potential power – The Getaway 3 went into hiding. SCE London later confirmed it had shelved the game to work on EyePet, and the Cockney caper was ditched for good when Shuhei Yoshida took over at worldwide studios.
Eight Days
Poor SCE London. First The Getaway 3 died, then Eight Days went the same way. Another darling of E3 2005, this actioner impressed with a tech demo set at a gorgeous petrol station, and promises of a map that spanned eight states. It was pulled in 2008, with Yoshida citing its lack of online play.
This article originally appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. For more great PlayStation coverage, you can subscribe here.
