2009 had its fair share of big releases and announcements, but we saw quite a few cancellations as well. The economy seemed to make publishers nervous and pull back on just about anything but the surest successes. So, as another part of our ongoing retrospective, we’re going to take a look at the games you might have been playing or looking forward to right now… if the plug hadn’t been pulled.
The most publicized canceled game this year wasn’t actually canceled at all, though we all thought it was. Duke Nukem Forever suffered a setback when 3D Realms shut its doors, and this was seen as the death knell for the longest-lasting vaporware in the industry. Reasons behind the move were plentiful, but it didn’t take long for 3D Realms to show itself again, pointing out that the studio as a whole wasn’t shut down, and it retained the rights to Duke Nukem Forever. The team working on Duke was let go, but we recently heard CEO Scott Miller state that it “doesn’t correlate to the demise of the project.” So Duke Nukem Forever isn’t dead, but it may well be in a deep coma.
Other canceled projects were only discovered in the aftermath of shuttered studios. When GRIN closed late in the year, it teased an “unreleased masterpiece that we were not allowed to finish.” Less than a week later, sources confirmed that the unfinished game was actually a western-developed Final Fantasy game being worked on with Square Enix. There was plenty of concept artwork to go around (above), but rumors spread that Square hadn’t paid GRIN for the work, instead arranging a deal to pay when the project was finished. That lack of funds may have helped lead to the studio’s closure.
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