Interplay's Fallout 3/"Van Buren"

By Steve Palley

Interplay's Fallout and Fallout 2, which came out in the late 1990s for the PC, are widely considered to be two of the best role-playing games of all time. The original Fallout was a revelation--from the sweet, maudlin strains of the game's introductory music, echoing around the carcass of a nuked city, all the way to your eventual discovery of the Master's plot to replace humanity with mutant slaves. As soon as your sheltered Vault-dweller stepped out into the irradiated desert that was once California, all bets were off. The game's "city of tomorrow" futurism, characterized by the Vault's fatuously optimistic 1950s-style technical diagrams, struck the perfect blend with the outside world's post-World War III gallows humor. Fallout's incredibly deep RPG gameplay, tons of dialogue, and multiplicity of storylines and subplots probably didn't hurt its case, either. The sequel was simply more of the same, only across an area about four times larger than the original Fallout. Simply put, if you didn't sink 150 hours into Fallout 2, you hadn't played it right.

This screenshot is courtesy of No Mutants Allowed.

What more could a Fallout fan possibly want? Fallout 3, of course! This game, code-named Van Buren by Interplay's internal Black Isle Studios was supposed to be the series' magnum opus. While the first two games had been set in California, the next chapter was going to take place in the Rocky Mountains, in and around the settlement of Denver. According to excited developer commentary and leaked screenshots, Black Isle Studios had developed a brand-new 3D engine for the game (Fallout 1 and 2 were both sprite-based and isometric), and they were planning to introduce a range of revolutionary new features to the Fallout universe--perhaps including online multiplayer and cooperative play.

Go to nma-fallout.com to see more of what you're missing.

Alas, you already know that Van Buren's story doesn't end well, because everything went sideways for Interplay and Black Isle starting in 2003. After a spate of commercial failures, including the less-successful Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Interplay experienced mounting financial difficulties, culminating in layoffs and a temporary shutdown in the summer of 2004. Fallout 3 had already fallen by the wayside by then, due to a lack of resources. Apparently, the engine was nearly complete and about half of the dialogue had been written when work ground to a halt near the end of 2003. Black Isle Studios chief Feargus Urquhart, who had already departed to found Obsidian Entertainment, spoke for all of Fallout fandom when he told GameSpot that "...Leaving Fallout 3 at Black Isle was one of the hardest things for me to do...while I'll probably never get to make another Fallout, I'd love to play one."

Black Isle was never able to finish its seminal game, and so Fallout fans were left feeling like they had gotten a 10 million Rad dose...for a period of about seven months, anyway. In July 2004, Interplay announced that it had auctioned off the Fallout license to Bethesda Entertainment for a little more than a million dollars, as part of its effort to regain solvency. Bethesda, the studio behind the hit Elder Scrolls series of first-person RPGs, has had the Fallout 3 project under its wing for a little more than a year now, and there have been very few details on the game's progress to this point. In a GameSpot interview, executive producer Todd Howard confirmed that Bethesda intends to keep the flavor and humor of the series as intact as possible, even though the new team has discarded Van Buren and started over from scratch.

Harpoon 4

By Jason Ocampo

It's sort of fitting that Larry Bond's Harpoon 4 was a game about modern naval warfare, because it went through the kind of torturous development cycle that multibillion dollar military boondoggles go through before they're finally put out of their misery. This is a game that was canceled, resurrected, and then transferred to a new developer, only to be canceled again, despite the best efforts of two different publishers. Along the way, the emotions of the Harpoon community seesawed back and forth between hope and despair. Needless to say, it wasn't supposed to be like this.

Realistic naval warfare never looked better.

Harpoon 4 was the version of Harpoon that fans had been waiting for. Finally, the excellent gameplay mechanics of the Harpoon system that let you simulate virtually any kind of modern-day naval battle would be mated with 3D graphics. Harpoon originally started out as a miniatures game in 1979, and it was so good that it not only garnered numerous awards, but it was also used as a training aid at both the US Naval Academy and on ships at sea. Tom Clancy even used Harpoon to test the naval strategies that appeared in his popular World War III novel, Red Storm Rising. The series made the digital leap in 1989, and the original PC version of Harpoon was a huge hit in those early days when PC gaming was still mainly the domain of war gamers and strategy fans. A sequel followed in the form of Harpoon II, but, if anything, the series became more focused to those hardcore players, with its realistic, Navy-style graphics.

Fast forward to 1997. Longtime war-game maker SSI announced that work on Harpoon 4 was under way. (The name Harpoon 3 was skipped over, since 4 would correspond with the newly released fourth-edition rules for the miniature game.) The first screenshots of Harpoon 4 were gorgeous to look at. While eye-candy features such as fully 3D aircraft carriers were certainly nice, what really drew attention to it were the battle maps, where the game is mainly played from. The maps were a huge improvement over previous versions, and they promised to present the complex action of Harpoon in a pretty and user-friendly way.

Admit it. This looks cool.

And then development hell happened. SSI's parent company, The Learning Company, was acquired by Mattel in 1999, and all of a sudden, hardcore naval war games didn't seem to fit in well with the maker of Barbie dolls. Meanwhile, the merger went so badly that Mattel's CEO was ousted by the shareholders and Mattel sold off its interactive arm to a private group. During that time, Harpoon 4 was dead in the water. However, Ubisoft eventually acquired the rights to the game and resurrected it in 2003. Things were looking up, until the studio developing it went under. Ubisoft then transferred the game to its Romanian studio. Unfortunately by then it was too late. Asking one studio to step in and make sense of another studio's code is a Herculean task, at best. So, in late 2003, Ubisoft finally axed the project, six years after work initially began. Harpoon creator and author Larry Bond reportedly acquired the remains to the project, but its status remains unknown to this day.

Harpoon Forever!

The good news is that Harpoon lives on, thanks to the dedication of its fan base. Advanced Gaming Systems owns the rights to the previous Harpoon computer games, and it has updated both the original PC version of Harpoon (known as Harpoon Classic) and Harpoon II (now named Harpoon 3) to run on Windows XP machines (and in the case of Harpoon 3, Macs as well). Furthermore, both versions feature improved gameplay mechanics and countless bug fixes. The tense gameplay still holds up remarkably well a decade later, and we recently had a chance to play our favorite scenario, which depicts a second US civil war. We love this scenario, mainly because its one of the rare times when you can pit a modern-day US carrier battle group, which is virtually invincible, against another US carrier battle group. Meanwhile, both version of Harpoon are ideal games for military buffs, particularly if you have older systems that aren't capable of the latest 3D eye candy. And while we hope that one day Harpoon 4 makes it into port, we still have plenty of options at our disposal.

Shenmue III

By Avery Score

[Editor's note: Okay, okay, we know Shenmue III hasn't officially been canceled, because it was never actually a game. But when we started talking about games that never came out, Avery's eyes rolled back in his head and he started shouting about how Shenmue is the greatest series ever made. We don't really buy the whole 'Shenmue as a way of life' thing, but hey, here's what he had to say.]

If Shenmue II had been shown in movie theaters, its ending would have elicited loud cursing from audiences worldwide. The game ends exactly as protagonist Ryo Hazuki unites two magical mirrors and is about to realize his potential as a martial artist. Unfortunately, after the game's lengthy denouement in rural China, you don't get to see him go Super-Saiyan, or whatever was supposed to happen. As a gamer, you've just been teased with no payoff. This is an infuriating way for one of gaming's most influential and underappreciated franchises to end. Even if Shenmue III was never officially announced, my heart was still broken. I feel cheated, and with good reason.

Nozomi and Ryo, right before they founded the World Class Wreckin' Cru.

Every guy has that one girl for which he still holds a torch. Even if you're married, you probably still wonder about that one girl who got away. Sure, your buddies may sneer at what might be a fish story, and mockingly tell you that she "gets bigger every year," but they still understand where you're coming from. For me, the little number is Nozomi Harasaki.

Nozomi was a peach. She was so darned patient with my romantic fumblings. She didn't even skip a beat when I asked her during one of her heartfelt good-byes where I could find some sailors. Although she was holed up in Canada during the events of Shenmue II, her memory haunted me from the docks of Aberdeen to the soaring mountains near Bailu Village.

Now, I reluctantly accepted Nozomi's absence under the assumption that we would resume our awkward affair in Shenmue III, which was to contain the final or near-final few chapters of what was originally to be Yu Suzuki's 16-part chef d'oeuvre. I figured we'd go out, drink some sake bombs, and I'd tell her about how I reconnected the Phoenix and Dragon mirrors. Then I'd show her my "mistral flash" and "darkside hazuki" techniques. Alas, this was not to be; low sales figures made me unlucky in love. I still experience pangs of anguish from time to time.

Had Shenmue and its sequel been given a fair shake and failed, I might be able to accept it. However, the circumstances surrounding these spectacular failures were far from auspicious.

Just look at these graphics!

The first Shenmue was released amid a level of hype that would make Peter Molyneux blush. The game was being developed for some untold millions of dollars, and was widely predicted to be the "killer app" the Dreamcast desperately needed. Whenever people start talking about killer apps, you should be worried. No single game is likely going to justify the purchase of a console these days, period.

Shenmue combined Virtua Fighter's elegant combat system with unprecedented exploration and emergent gameplay--all before academia started praising these qualities in games like Grand Theft Auto III. Oh, and last January's Resident Evil 4 reintroduced "quick timer" events, but didn't give them a name or hype them for months in advance. That was probably a smart move, as people ate the feature up, asserting that it made the cutscenes more intense, which it did.

Shenmue was also one of the first games to feature hours and hours of spoken dialogue, which made its storytelling all the more compelling. Those who oohed and aahed over Knights of the Old Republic's extensive use of voice acting probably didn't play Shenmue. Man, I am so bitter.

When people went to play Shenmue for the first time, they seemed to forget that they were about to enjoy a video game in the year 2000, not a computer-animated film in the year 2019 with replicants operating the projection booth. People expected Shenmue, with so much money behind it, to be a quantum leap over what they were used to seeing. As it turned out, it was just an atomic leap.

Apparently, Shenmue sales did not recoup the $50 million AM2 spent on the game's development--not even close. The game sold so poorly in the US that its sequel wasn't even released here (until the Xbox). This is too bad, because Shenmue II greatly refined the gameplay of its predecessor.

Suzuki was quoted in Electronic Gaming Monthly as saying, "The story is completed. The problem is we have not decided whether or not to move forward with designing the game yet. If there's a demand for it, we'd love to make it." Don't get coy with us!

Even if Shenmue III never gets made, South Korean and Chinese gamers will at least glean insight into the plot points that could have been with the upcoming Shenmue Online MMORPG, right? Actually, it looks like that game's been canned as well. Apparently, Korea's JC Entertainment halted development on the project last May. After what seemed to be a successful closed beta last year, one can only wonder what the heck happened.

Here's the only reasonable conclusion: If you're a Shenmue fan, it looks like your lot in life is suffering. Don't let the quarterly Internet rumor flare-ups fool you. You'll never get cozy with Nozomi; you'll never defeat Lan Di; and you'll definitely never find out what in the hell all those ancient mirrors were for. However since fans love the game so much and since no information has been made official about its existence or not, go ahead and hold on to a little hope.

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Special thanks to Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone of Obsidian Entertainment.