Games That Could Have Been

Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."

My pick...

[Xelios]

... for a game that could have been, Freespace 3. Way to leave us all hanging Volition :(

At least the game was continued by a source code release and player designed campaigns, still it would have been nice to get an official conclusion to the story.

Re:Because...

[Cyclon]

We're quoting Mythbusters as an authoritative source now?

Re:Because...

[Gulthek]

O. M. G.

Mythbusters is *entertainment*, not science! While their antics are somewhat entertaining, they are just that: antics. There is no rigor, no carefully thoughtout experiments, no theory, and no reasoning. While they may prove something empirically (and some of their questions lend themselves well to this) their methods make it impossible to generalize to answer the question with authority.

Re:Because...

[blueg3]

That summary of their analysis isn't that good -- it skips the important admissions of where what they tested differs from actual Hindenburg design. It does include that they used hydrogen-air mixtures instead of hydrogen. It also includes that the doped cloth (doped in an intentionally more-reactive mixture than was actually used on the Hindenburg) burned faster than undoped cloth, but this doesn't really address the question of why it was on fire in the first place, which was the real problem.

If the skin of the Hindenburg was really painted with thermite, then it would be fairly safe -- thermite is tough to ignite (though, once burning, is very hot and difficult to extinguish).

Re:Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

they did pretty clearly show that a hydrogen blimp burns faster with thermite paint than it does without.
They even more clearly showed that thermite paint alone did Fuck all.
That by far the most important ingredient is hydrogen.

Over-complicating the simple stuff

[Bones3D_mac]

This is sort of a weird issue that seems to come up whenever someone has a game concept, but suddenly become intimidated by the industry and the overwhelming quality of the content they generate. The fact is, you don't need a huge team of developers and technicians to produce a great game. You just need a good idea and a couple people with enough determination and skill to make it happen.

Heck, look at the first person shooter genre. It was initially brought to life by only two people who loved to play games. Now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and the resulting engines produced each year often creates the standards for which all other games are judged.

Nowadays, you don't even need to be a programming genius capable of juggling dozens of complex equations to produce content. You can now get fairly simple to use game development tools, such as Unity [unity3d.com] to design prototypes and tweak things until it finally feels right. Even if it doesn't end up being the final product, having a working prototype can make a huge difference in even pitching your concepts to other, larger developers. (The ones in charge of such decisions often need visual aids beyond just a storyboard or sketch, since they likely aren't developers themselves.)

If not anything else, even Flash can work in a pinch for prototyping or development.

Re:Put it on the to-do list, Will.

[tepples]

Personally if I found I'd been duped into playing a game for hours only to find there is no solution, it would piss me off.

Have you beaten Tetris yet?