Projects that fizzled out that you really wish hadn't.

PsychedelicDiamond

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That Silent Hill game Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Tel Toro were working on before Kojima and Konami split. That demo was fantastic and... man, I'm making myself sad again. Why can't we have nice things?
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
The ones that really come to mind at the moment are a few webcomics.

There is Poppy O'Possum, a very excellent web comic with great art that still updates but not very often and I read that the creator was getting burned out with it.
http://www.poppy-opossum.com/comic/a-story/

There is also Beatrix Overseer, also really great art and an interesting premise, but this one updates even less frequently, I think there has only been one update this whole year.
http://beatrizoverseer.tumblr.com/page/44

Then there is Derelict which was pretty interesting but has had no new comic pages in slightly over a year, although there are a few notes from the author.
https://derelictcomic.tumblr.com/post/159475476183
 

Thaluikhain

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09philj said:
but Attack of the Cybermen, Vengence on Varos, and Revelation of the Daleks are hidden gems.
I'd have added "The Two Doctors" to that. Attack of the Cybermen and Vengeance on Varos are a bit of a mixed bag for me, especially as Vengeance on Varos is criticising violent TV. Doing it well, "And cut it...now" was brilliant, "What are we going to do?" "Dunno" was brilliant, Sil was brilliant, but being a gratuitously violent show while trying to condemn gratuitously violent shows doesn't work so much.
 

Hawk of Battle

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In addition to many of the things already said, I'm going to add Stargate Universe. Yes, yes, I know, many people didn't like it, but as a massive SG fan who's watched the previous shows about 10 times each, I thought it was ok. It was different, yes, but after 15 seasons of two other shows doing mostly the same things I was fine with that. I just would have preferred a more definitive ending to my favourite sci-fi franchise than what we got.

Also, Tru Calling was an interesting show. Took a while in the first season to get out of it's basic "problem of the week" setup and start delving into some of the deeper mythos, including adding an interesting antagonist and overarching philosophical counterpoint to the heroes actions, but once it did things really picked up. Shame it only got like, 6 more episodes in season 2, just when it was starting to get good.

WITCH was another good one. We got 1 good season, and 1 great season (thank you Greg Wiesman) and that was it. They even left us with a setup for the next seasons antagonist, so clearly more was planned.

The Oddworld Quintology. Or Tetrology or whatever it was supposed to be. They had a bunch of games planned, and even a potential movie I think, and then they just... stopped. I think moving to 3d and jumping console after Exodus was what did them in. Now all we get is unnecessary remakes of the originals.

Lastly, Monty Oums Dead Fantasy series. I know it was only ever being done as a showcase of his animation skills, all done in his spare time, which ultimately got eaten up with working on RvB and then RWBY, but I still would have liked to see him finish the series. Alas, now we will never see what else he had planned...
Even more of a shame because apparently his Rikku vs Ayane fight was supposed to be amazing, and Rikku is like my favourite character from anything ever.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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PsychedelicDiamond said:
That Silent Hill game Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Tel Toro were working on before Kojima and Konami split. That demo was fantastic and... man, I'm making myself sad again. Why can't we have nice things?
It would have been so fun! The teasers and trailers looked great!
 

Elvis Starburst

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Drathnoxis said:
It's obvious the series is dead in the water now, despite no official statement from the creator.
Boop, here ya go! [http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spq9at]

I was sad to see that happen. I was excited for the revival as well. But, I'll always remember SMBZ fondly.

OT: While not a gaming related thing, I seriously wish Phonebloks [https://phonebloks.com/] took off. But then Google bought it, turned it into Project Ara, and then... scrapped the whole thing :I The guy who came up with the original idea was pissed, and understandably so
 

Redlin5_v1legacy

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The Escapist Magazine as a business. :p

I also want the next Game of Thrones book to be released already so I can re-binge the books.

Also not dead [http://www.lackadaisycats.com/index.php] but very slow.
 

McElroy

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I'll second Dragon Ball Z Abridged. While they won't tell the reason outright, it's a rather clear issue about the careers of those people: they want to keep making video entertainment things and such, BUT they have a portfolio that's filled with legally questionable material they made for some fans. Even if they owe their existence to those fans, it's not something that forms the basis for a more renowned career in the business.

A sexy-pervy webcomic Bloomin' Fairies ended abruptly (and the author actually PULLED IT OFF THE INTERNET) for a similar-ish reason. Patreon updated its terms, making them vaguer towards pornographic material. Combine that with not really wanting to make your softcore porn-comic the highlight of your portfolio and you might get what happened here. Also I have a copy of the whole comic. :^) For history.
 
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necromanzer52 said:
Guillermo Del Toro's version of The Hobbit. It fell apart after 18 months of pre-production. Instead, we got 3 movies I'd rather not talk about.

I sometimes lie awake at night, wondering what might have been.
PsychedelicDiamond said:
That Silent Hill game Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Tel Toro were working on before Kojima and Konami split. That demo was fantastic and... man, I'm making myself sad again. Why can't we have nice things?
Or his "In the Mountains of Madness" movie. Or third Hellboy. This man really has bad luck when it comes to this stuff.
 

immortalfrieza

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Morroblivion, Skywind, Skyoblivion, and the two that were going to update Fallout 3 and New Vegas into the Fallout 4 engine. While they might still be working on Morrooblivion and Skywind I haven't heard much of anything about either, and some B.S. legal issues killed the Fallout 3 remake which probably means the New Vegas one isn't far behind. All these games could have really used the update especially Morrowind and it's nuts that Bethesda themselves haven't done it.
 

Drathnoxis

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Elvis Starburst said:
Drathnoxis said:
It's obvious the series is dead in the water now, despite no official statement from the creator.
Boop, here ya go! [http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spq9at]

I was sad to see that happen. I was excited for the revival as well. But, I'll always remember SMBZ fondly.
Yeah, I've read that a year ago. But it says:

A lot of people have been asking on a near daily basis about when the next episode of SMBZ will be coming out. And the answer to that is a whole hearted...

I don't know...

...

Fact is, SMBZ is the least of my priorities at this time. But rest assured, I have not forgotten about it.
Which clearly is different from 'never gonna happen'.
 

Elvis Starburst

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Drathnoxis said:
Faaaaaaiiiiiirrrrr, buuut... I'm not really holding my breath. Unless there's a huge turn-around, I don't imagine it'll happen. If it does, it probably won't be for a long time
 

JCAll

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Spoony is legitimately the funniest guy to come out of the internet reviewer craze. Shame about the whole situation, but it's not exactly an unfamiliar story. He finally got his Twitter account back though, so at least he can ***** about wrestling again. As long as he's not entirely vanished I can still pretend like he'll make a comeback.
 

Tiger King

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Silentpony said:
The Lord Inquisitor, Sadly cancelled due to being cancelled. Best animation I've ever see in the 40k Universe. It was supposed to have Inquisitors hunting down Alpha Legion with the help of Grey Knights...alas and alack.
He also, from what I have read on his website etc, got full backing from games workshop!
saw in one of his recent videos that he just doesn't have the resources to finish it.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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carlsberg export said:
Silentpony said:
The Lord Inquisitor, Sadly cancelled due to being cancelled. Best animation I've ever see in the 40k Universe. It was supposed to have Inquisitors hunting down Alpha Legion with the help of Grey Knights...alas and alack.
He also, from what I have read on his website etc, got full backing from games workshop!
saw in one of his recent videos that he just doesn't have the resources to finish it.
Something about it just rings off to me. Full backing from GW, with the rumors say a rewrite of the script with Dan Abnett and the Black Library voice actors, yet he doesn't have the resources? There's a hundred animators who would do this for free out of love for 40k, 1000 who could be hired using a kickstarter or gofundme, 10,000 if GW put some money behind it.
Something else happened.
 

Recusant

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Let's see, off the top of my head:
-Freespace. Not only because the games were fun and the story experience compelling, but because they were masterworks of minimalist storytelling. There were actual named (and voiced) human (and Vasudan) characters, but aside from Aken Bosch, I dare you to name one. The characters those games were the starships; grand and glorious and fragile. And huge! I still have a picture of the magazine ad with a (slightly distorted) four-page foldout of the Lucifer, and the tiny dot labeled "you are here". Just think what modern graphics and processing power could do for a game like that. Plus, both of them were fully force-feedback compliant. Come to think of it...
-Force Feedback. Okay, this wasn't abandoned by the creator (come to think of it, none of these were, but no one else's posts have stuck to Drathnoxis's conditions, so neither will I); it's stuck behind IP protections and lawsuits, but still. In a society where everyone seems to think that "virtual reality" consists of nothing more than "strapping a monitor to your face", it's galling to realize that not only were we promised so much more, but many of us actually HAD so much more. Some still do. And when it seemed like Novint had finally done it- either found a technical workaround or a legal one- and was poised to conquer the market, showing the youngsters what this new version of old tech could do, and even impressing the veterans, and then... then the depression hit, the economy shook, and Novint and the falcon crumbled. They still see some use in medical, industrial, and architectural training and visualization, but that the biggest step forward in immersion was sidelined by bad timing just feels bogus.
-Reaper. This was a show about a young man who's driving home from work on his twenty-first birthday when the devil (played by Ray Wise at his gloriously affable best) pops up in the back of his car and tells him that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born, and now he has to work as a bounty hunter capturing escaped souls and returning them to Hell. A simple premise that wound up going in some very interesting directions before the writer's strike happened. The second season, only half-length, ramped up the overarching plot, but also had a stupidly long digression that consisted of one of the characters being attracted to his new stepsister. Social awkwardness can lead to funny situations, but doesn't work as a substitute for humor (I still suspect that the sucess of Seinfeld was due to some kind of deal with the devil), and it really can't do it over multiple episodes. Once that nonsense was dealt with, things really started getting interesting- how can someone else sell your soul, anyway?- and then the show got canceled.
-Battlestar Galactica. No, not that one, the original. The first sci-fi show to cost more than a million dollars per episode, and show what that sort of money could do. Also... well, it's hard for me to type these words; it's even hard for me to think them, but apparently people in the 70's were smarter than they are today; they realized that if a cameraman has epilepsy, it would be best to not have him work in a field of marbles during an earthquake. I tried to watch the new series and got about an hour in before I couldn't fight the nausea and threw up. When a guy who has no problems with Descent and plays the Alien in AVP needs a puke bucket to watch your show, something's gone wrong. The original BG (battlestar is one one; "BSG" stands for 'battlestar ship group') was a bit cheesy and more than a bit campy, and it reused footage to the point that even blind people noticed, but it did not deserve to get canceled after only one season- and the real kick in the pants was what followed: I have been trying, on and off, for decades, the come up with something positive to say about Galactica 1980, and all I've got is that the title would be a good name for a roller disco.
-The Critic. Think of what Family Guy would be if they dropped the crudity but kept the relatability, lost the hostility but kept the bite, and kept the rapid-fire change-of-reference-frame jokes, but made them actually funny (consistently) and often actually clever. Then it gets canceled after the second season and its final episode is a clip show.
-Jagged Alliance. So back in '94 Julian Gollop descended from on high and gave us X-Com: UFO Defense (well, okay; he gave us UFO: Enemy Unknown, but if the worst part of a game is that its name is limp and uninspiring, it's a success by any reasonable measure). X-Com was wonderful, but over the ensuing decades, only two games have really done anything to improve the basic formulas: Terror From the Deep was an expansion pack that walked like a game, Interceptor was an essentially unrelated game cashing in on the name, and Enforcer was an abomination unto all that was good and true. The Bureau- well, let's just say they looked at the worst game in the series, said "we need more of that", then made a version of it that was a Bioshock ripoff. When people complained about the E3 preview, they retooled it into a Mass Effect ripoff. That's all that needs to be said, really. XCOM: Enemy Unknown oversimplified the game, removed the tactical options that came with firing and then moving, and got rid of the title hyphen without ever explaining why. Apocalypse was the only game in the series that gave us real concrete improvements (beyond opening doors without walking through them, and reserving time units for kneeling, thanks TFTD!), and it was essentially the Sith Lords of its time: an excellent two-thirds of a game, sold as a finished product. Jagged Alliance was a separate series, and it's not like X-Com invented squad-based tactical combat, but JA2 pushed things farther than even Apocalypse had done. It, too, was far from perfect, but you had the baseline here for a series that would rise to take up where X-Com had left off, and what came of it? Nothing. Lots and lots of nothing. An updated rerelease that added nothing but bugs, an lackluster expansion for that rerelease, and a bunch of farming out the title to third-party devs who did nothing with it. Bleh.

Major Tom said:
Babylon 5: Crusade.
There was once an English TV show called about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun moving next door to a Jewish couple. This probably sounds like a high-tension drama, but was actually a sitcom. It was called "Heil Honey, I'm Home!". Now, while this premise could have been hilarious, it would have been deeply insensitive and insulting, so the show was canceled after a single episode, an impressively short run.

Back in 1969, some of the people behind the wildly popular Laugh In made a show called Turn On, which was supposed to be a sex-themed version of the same idea. It was canceled during the airing of the first episode. Crusade, however, beat them both: it was canceled before the first episode aired, which I believe is still the record. Babylon 5 was a creation of almost Wagnerian intensity and control, and it beat the hell out of JMS; look at pictures of him before and after. It only lasted five years, but it looks like he aged twenty. The result was one of the finest TV shows ever made, but it definitely took its toll.

Also, there was one thing that came after Legend of the Rangers: The Lost Tales. The idea was to have a series of short anthology set pieces, thematically connected, but freestanding. Only one disc got released, and it didn't sell well enough to warrant making more; JMS said he wouldn't do anything more with B5 if the project wouldn't have the money to do it right.

The Lost Tales themselves were... well, they weren't bad, but they were very small. Each has two main characters and one secondary, and that's basically it. The scenes taking place in a recreated station (Warner Brothers lost the old sets) are empty and dark and quiet, a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the station we'd last seen a decade before. It's hard to watch without feeling that something truly amazing was lost, and you're standing in the ruins. A testament to the power of the show, I suppose, but it's still sad.
 

thepyrethatburns

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Fear Effect Inferno: Killed so they could free up resources for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (so poetic revenge was served in the end).

Final Fighting Fantasy: It was increasingly apparent that the animator was taking on more than he could handle for a newgrounds project near the end.
 

Drathnoxis

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Recusant said:
-The Critic. Think of what Family Guy would be if they dropped the crudity but kept the relatability, lost the hostility but kept the bite, and kept the rapid-fire change-of-reference-frame jokes, but made them actually funny (consistently) and often actually clever. Then it gets canceled after the second season and its final episode is a clip show.
I was actually thinking about this show when I was writing the OP. Too bad executive meddling made the second season far worse than the first.