Planned 2010 Natal game canceled
Despite “working on a tight schedule,” the untitled game is gone
I know what you’re thinking right now: “Not another canceled game.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly the case this time around. A Rare game scheduled to come out next Fall 2010 is gone.
Let’s go back in time a bit: on a website entitled LinkedIn, which is dedicated to professionals posting their CV and posting their current jobs, a Rare employee mentioned what was to be a Rare game for Project Natal. Bjørn Toft Madsen, Software Director at Rare, has recently been sharing some quite interesting information about his present commitments: “Manage a large team of engineers working on a tight schedule to go from pre-production to finished product in a year.” This task was started last August, after leading “two independent teams” that “maintained Xbox Live Avatars and built Xbox Live Sky and Canal+ content players.” Back then, we speculated that this was definitely a Natal project, since MundoRare can confirm that all of Rare’s future projects are based on Natal (but may not be “games” as gamers define them).
Fast forward to today, and the “undisclosed prototype” as we didn’t know it is gone. According to Split-Screen, the reason for the game being canceled was “due to [the] changing business environment.”
Considering the timeframe that the project was planned to be developed with, as well as Mr. Madsen’s resume involving the Xbox Live Avatars, it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume that the “undisclosed prototype” was Avatar related. Personally, The Fast and The Furriest comes to mind when hearing this, despite that game being canceled a while ago. Whatever it was, it unfortunately adds another notch to yet another game being canceled by Rare, after Not-Perfect Dark 2 and Kameo 2. With Rare’s silence being, well, more silent than usual, these cancellations don’t help the faithful.
Somehow related news
- Rare may be working on the 360’s version of Wii Fit ()
- A Rare Natal game “may be” released in October 2010 ()
- Perfect Dark 2 canceled, may have evolved into something else ()
- Rare to open a second studio facility in Birmingham ()
- Will Perfect Dark Return? ()
11 Comments
I said it once and I’ll say it again. MICROSOFT IS RUINING RARE. They need to move to Sony if they don’t want to go back to Nintendo! Sony might be having trouble with sales these days, but at least they won’t be constantly pushing new projects and forcing them to work on it.
Comment by Hudson — 05.Dec.09 @ 4:41 am
From what I understand Rare is working on numerous unnaounced titles right now and this is just one of them. If they drop one it’s fine, they can focus more work on the others.
Comment by Josh — 05.Dec.09 @ 6:24 am
This is a hugely glumb time to be a rare fan… I’d rather a game from them that I don’t care for than no game at all… Bummer. After banjo I thought it might be like half a year until we heard their new project… And now it’s cancelled before we can even know what it was, and it was SoOoOo close to making it out.
Comment by Billy — 05.Dec.09 @ 6:41 am
I posted this already weeks ago over at the Rare-Extreme forums. Are you sure that this was a game at all?
With such an incredibly tight deadline I’m more leaning towards it being another piece of tech/system stuff, like the Avatar/Sky player thing.
what happened to that feature about SABREMAN STAMPEDE with aparently new information?? ,that you were going to publish xmooth??
Comment by DARK AGENT — 05.Dec.09 @ 8:27 pm
I’m honestly losing faith in Rare. They’re a shadow of what they were and these constant game cancellations are destroying whatever faith I had left in them. They’re becoming tools for Microsoft. Maybe it’s time they hung up their boots, they’re a shadow of what they were. The glory days have long gone
Comment by Dave — 05.Dec.09 @ 9:30 pm
oh wow dave what incredible insight, how bout you just do us a favour and piss off
Comment by harry — 06.Dec.09 @ 12:14 am
Rare once again, *sigh* is pretty much failing. Microsoft is running and forcing rare and putting pressure on them to get things done.I wonder what this game was gonna be like.
Comment by KI32010 — 06.Dec.09 @ 2:12 am
Please everyone don’t blame Microsoft. The first comment takes the biscuit.
Comment by Long John Silver — 06.Dec.09 @ 1:03 pm
i dont care but i hope now that they have supposedly cancelled this one they might make kameo 2 or somthing else
Comment by j — 18.Mar.10 @ 9:21 pm
Rare have been on a downward spiral since the start of the century.
I’m surprised Microsoft are not looking at the people running the company. They think that by getting Peter Moly involved it will change things but look what the last Peter M said about them, I promise you its only a matter of time before this Peter is staying the same.
Chris S running PD 2, haha, I bet Chris T just loved that one given Chris S seems to make a career overtaking his failed projects.
If Microsoft want to sort that place out, they need to look at the management, they’re all super friendly pals who look after each other (stemmed from pally nights out in lacklustre towns), sadly most of them should have taken their share options and gone a long time ago.
The entire heart of that company has been ripped out, the old staff mostly hate working there and only do so because they don’t have the balls to go elsewhere or are just comfy pottering along and nodding along.
Sadly, that is not what makes a successful games unit.
You can forget anything good ever coming from this place, just constant disappointment as the reality of what that place is conflicts with the bullshit leadership that goes on.
That place is so rotten MS will never sort it out, they had no idea waht they were buying into when they bought this place. It had already gone stale in the 2 years prior to that, and when they took over (With their usual we’ll buy our market approach) the only staff that stayed were share holders or hangers who didn’t care.
Anyone with any real heart had already left or was planning to as soon as the shares came in.
Microsoft, you were tucked up.
Comment by I-told-you-would-fail — 04.Dec.09 @ 9:51 pm