Nullary Sources

Here’s an older and slightly busted site I just discovered called thecan.org. It’s a collection of stories about canceled video games: what they would have been like and what went wrong.

What is thecan.org?

thecan.org can be considered a pet cemetary for computer games that never made it. Lost between the designer’s incantation of ‘That’ll be so cool…’ to the producer’s call of ‘Ship it!’ and the developers’ wails of ‘No! It’s not ready!’, never to hear the reviewers blessings of ‘91%’ and the player’s post-cellophane sighs. thecan.org celebrates the memory of these games, in the hope that we might revere their memory and learn from their fate.

These are some cool postmortems about things that would have been cool if they were finished. Here, for example, are some features that were planned for the failed Sierra Lord of the Rings-themed MMO game Middle-earth:

Permanent death: a player could be murdered and their character actually deleted. It wouldn’t happen very often; nearly all monsters would refrain from perma-killing, and players would have to make a conscious decision that would then brand them as a murderer, to be hunted down by others.

Character psychology: you couldn’t just tell your character to kill another player, you had to train them to become a cold-blooded murderer. This could have been neat in lots of ways, sort of Simslike.

Player-based and algorithmic gameplay. As alluded to above, including things like town-building (and destroying), algorithmically populated spawn points and ‘adventure’ generation, etc.

Player Monsters: to draw achievers away from pk’ing, players would be able to play Monster characters. You’d start with a weak Orc, and if you did well (scoring points by beating up on players or whatnot) you’d graduate to an Uruk, etc. The stronger Monsters would be progressively more location-bound, so eventually a winning player might get to play a Balrog, but they’d only be able to hang out in Moria. Players would have to go looking for the big bad trouble.