Dead End was going to get the same push as Burn:Cycle

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Devin
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Dead End was going to get the same push as Burn:Cycle

Post by Devin » Tue Apr 06, 2010 11:23 pm

Found another article that has Dave McElhatten stating that Dead End would get a similar treatment to Burn:Cycle. With a focus on the games music!

Kinda sounded like they would have released a Burn:Cycle type package. Maybe including an audio CD with the game and a big marketing push.

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Re: Dead End was going to get the same push as Burn:Cycle

Post by jimby » Fri May 07, 2010 3:27 am

Devin wrote:Found another article that has Dave McElhatten stating that Dead End would get a similar treatment to Burn:Cycle. With a focus on the games music!

Kinda sounded like they would have released a Burn:Cycle type package. Maybe including an audio CD with the game and a big marketing push.
Hehe, Dave may have said that, but I was the project manager on Dead End, and believe me when I say that there was no way DE was going to get out of the door at Philips into release. The game was a mess, and got worse as we went farther on in development. Mercifully killed long before completion.

The marketing department had seen very little of the game, so they couldn't allocate funding until they had done an evaluation, which never happened.

-j

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Post by Alan_Eng » Sat May 08, 2010 10:02 am

Devin/Jimby - VERY interesting stuff there - thanks very much for posting this. As a cd-i collector for 16 years, I have to say one of my biggest disappointments was that this game did not get released. I remember reading a preview in cd-i magazine and could not wait to play it. At least now I know the reason why it never came out. I just think our cd-i was crying out for this type of game (being another driving game). Jimby, did you work on any other cancelled cd-i games? Would love to hear more...

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Post by Bas » Sat May 08, 2010 1:26 pm

Alan_Eng wrote:Devin/Jimby - VERY interesting stuff there - thanks very much for posting this. As a cd-i collector for 16 years, I have to say one of my biggest disappointments was that this game did not get released. I remember reading a preview in cd-i magazine and could not wait to play it. At least now I know the reason why it never came out. I just think our cd-i was crying out for this type of game (being another driving game). Jimby, did you work on any other cancelled cd-i games? Would love to hear more...
He shared a lot more three years back Alan! Check out here

Anyway nice trivia again Jimby! I find it interesting to hear that quite a few CD-i games were cancelled for technical difficulties, like Microcosm and some stuff at Funhouse (being it just a mess or not, it was apparently a difficult task to code for CD-i)

I remember talking to David McElhatten who said Philips Media granted small developers money without checking throroughly the base and knowledge to code for CD-i, like with Cigam.

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Post by jimby » Sat May 08, 2010 4:30 pm

Alan_Eng wrote:Jimby, did you work on any other cancelled cd-i games? Would love to hear more...

This is what I can remember working on:

CD-i Games:
Voyeur II (CD-i SKU cancelled)
Zelda's Adventure
Ripley's Believe it or Not (cancelled)
Citizen Dwayne (cancelled)
Dead End (cancelled)
City Golf (cancelled)
The Crow (cancelled)
Caesar's World of Gambling

Non-Games
Draw 50
Stay Healthy for Life (cancelled)
Aesop's Fables

PC Games (for Philips)
Fighter Duel
Independence War (I-War)
Down in the Dumps

PC Games (for Infogrames)
EF2000
F22
F22 Total Air War
Wargasm
Independence War sequels
Fighter Duel 2 (cancelled)

There were others that were in development that were killed early, and some that I have probably forgotten.

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Post by jimby » Sat May 08, 2010 4:38 pm

Alan_Eng wrote: I remember talking to David McElhatten who said Philips Media granted small developers money without checking throroughly the base and knowledge to code for CD-i, like with Cigam.
This is known in the business as "qualifying" developers, which publishers need to do before they assign projects. Qualifying means making sure the developer has the resources, talent, and financial solvency to see a project through to completion. Philips got lazy sometimes.

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Post by Devin » Mon May 10, 2010 11:20 pm

Interesting you should mention the city golf game, I recently uncovered a small article about that with Dave McElhatten discussing the technical merits!

Was Citizen Dwayne the game 'A New Day' just under a different name? Also don't recall mention of Ripley game, any more info? :D

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Post by Alan_Eng » Tue May 11, 2010 9:56 pm

Would love to hear more about the City Golf game Devin/Jimby. I love golf and am interested to know what type of golf title this would have been. Why were so many games cancelled? Am so gutted about this.

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Post by jimby » Thu May 13, 2010 8:36 pm

Alan_Eng wrote:Would love to hear more about the City Golf game Devin/Jimby. I love golf and am interested to know what type of golf title this would have been. Why were so many games cancelled? Am so gutted about this.
A lot of games were cancelled because at that point in time (1994-95) Philips Media was in transition. It became obvious that CD-i sales could not sustain the division, so an attempt was made to develop multiple SKUs of a game for CD-i, PCs, and Macs. Unfortunately because the CD-i platform was so technically limited, it meant that the PC and Mac SKUs of a game would be hopelessly crippled and non-competitive in the market. This sometimes led to the entire game being cancelled.

Another issue is that some of the developers that Philips Media had cultivated over the years were focused solely on CD-i development, and had not developed sufficient technical skills and ability to compete in the PC game market.

Finally, Philips had some developers that simply should not have been developing game software, period. These were companies that might have made their living doing something else (such as 3D graphics, commercial productions, film or video, or special fxs) and then hired a couple of engineers to do games.

For developers it was a "gold rush" mentality at the time; everybody wanted to feed at the Philips Media trough, and many of them shouldn't have been anywhere near the trough. :)

When I first got hired as a PM at Philips I was so depressed at the state of game development that the first thing I did was bring in a new game/developer who had the chops to do state of the art PC games (Jaeger Software/Fighter Duel). This game went on to become the top selling game for Philips Media. Had I not been able to do that I would have probably quit in total depression, because the other games that I was assigned (example: Who Shot Johnny Rock - Castilian Spanish Version, Kingdom, etc.) we're so ultimately boring and depressing that I simply would not have been able to continue on.

I will also take some of the blame for lobbying to get certain games cancelled (City Golf, Dead End, The Crow, etc.) because they were simply not good. I hated to see money wasted on stuff that wasn't going to sell when there were more worthwhile projects to do.

BTW, Citizen Dwayne was later retitled A New Day, just before it too was cancelled.

City Golf was supposed to be a golf game in NY City. The developer had no realtime 3D engine, and wanted to do it as sprites over a 3D rendered backdrop, which is lame. Then they couldn't get the sprites to scale properly (which I knew was going to be an issue.) Then the developer changed the game from 18 holes to 9 holes because they were going over budget.

The final straw was when the developer completely missed a development milestone, but Philips, because of politics, overruled me and decided to pay the developer as if the milestone was completed, which completely undercut my authority on the project.

At that point that project was in my crosshairs for cancellation, and I finally succeeded (with lots of help) before the company wasted even more money.

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Post by Devin » Thu May 13, 2010 11:25 pm

Don't worry! We won't burn you at the cross for cancellation of CD-i games... promise :wink:

You talk a lot of sense and from my experience conducting retrospectives and interviews, the best games for CD-i came from small close knit teams. My personal preference includes games like The Apprentice by SPC Vision, the excellent games from Philips ADS including Pac-Panic and Arcade Classics. All European efforts.

American developed games that I rate for CD-i includes Hotel Mario by Philips Fantasy Factory, Muatant Rampage developed by Animation Magic and Plunderball from ISG Productions a surprisingly good pinball game. The later was never released by Philips but was given a limited distribution after a prototype was discovered!

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