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Warner Bros. registers URLs for Midway games presumed dead

Publisher stakes claim to Gauntlet DS, This Is Vegas, and Criminal Web addresses, indicating previously abandoned projects may be revived.

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Last year Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment purchased Midway for $49 million, instantly establishing itself in the fighting game genre with the Mortal Kombat series. Along with the fighting franchise, WBIE also picked up Midway's extensive back catalog of arcade and console games, as well as a few more recent titles that never saw the light of day.

Drink up! This Is Vegas might be back on!
Drink up! This Is Vegas might be back on!

That may change, as WBIE last week registered a handful of Web site domain names suggesting that the publisher is considering bringing out a trio of titles that had been canceled, assumed abandoned, or simply not acknowledged in some time. As spotted by Superannuation, WBIE staked its claim to career-criminal.com, gauntletds.com, gauntletthegame.com, and eclipse-vegas.com for the next two years. Of those sites, only eclipse-vegas.com is active, with nothing but a logo for This Is Vegas and the words "Coming soon…"

An open-world game, This Is Vegas for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC was originally intended as a holiday 2008 release. The game was supposed to take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notorious Nevada gambling mecca, depicting its many vices through open-world gameplay.

However, Midway delayed the project, saying it needed to give developer Surreal Software (The Suffering: Ties that Bind) more time to make the title a must-have release. WBIE did not confirm any release plans for This Is Vegas after the Midway acquisition and in January laid off employees at Surreal and two other Seattle-based studios.

Criminal first surfaced in August of 2006, when a Midway job listing revealed that the open-world action game was in development at the publisher's Austin development studio. However, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 project was never officially announced before its 2008 cancellation, which was tied to a wave of layoffs.

Gauntlet DS is another game that surfaced in 2008 and has yet to see release. However, Gauntlet DS wasn't actually a Midway game. It was originally announced by Eidos (now part of Square Enix), but later surfaced on the Entertainment Software Rating Board database as being published by Majesco.

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