Top 5 Gaming Vaporware

Vaporware can be defined in a variety of ways; be it software that was promised but never delivered or anything that was promoted like crazy but never delivered… the bottom line is that us consumers never received the goods we were promised.

Some games like Prey and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that were considered vaporware one upon a time have either been released or have got concrete release dates, but there’s one game that is still the poster child for all things vaporware… Duke Nukem Forever. In this article, we’ll take a look at Duke and other such ill fated products.

Campfire

I can’t tell you how stoked I was when I first heard about this game. For the first time, you could play as the hunter instead of the hunted, stalking, killing and terrorizing bunch of innocent people holed up in a deserted cabin using a plethora of tools like machetes, axes, chainsaws, knives and more; think of this game as your very own Scream or I know What you did Last Summer, only you would be the bad guy doling out all the pain instead off running around scared. This “reverse survival horror” game was announced sometime in 2004 for the PS2 and the Xbox, by relatively unknown German developer, Daydream Software but unfortunately, it just vanished into thin air…just like that. Since this game never had a big name backing it from the start, people didn’t care about it a lot to begin with and my dreams of tormenting innocent people vanished alongside this title.
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Duke Nukem Forever

Yeah, I know, it’s been done to death, but no vaporware list is complete without this game. Riding high on the success of Duke Nukem 3D, 3D Realms’ ambitious project (or so it seemed at the time) was announced way back in 1997 along with another game that miraculously got released last year, Prey. Now many feel this over ambitious nature of announcing two projects simultaneously is what lead to their downfall. The game has “supposedly” been through tons of changes including a bunch of game engines as well but George Broussard, head honcho of 3D Realms keeps surfacing from time to time trying to convince us that the game’s in development (and you know what, I do believe him to a certain extent) and it will be out one day, but lack of any sort of proof makes it hard to believe him. However, he did release a screenshot of the game a couple of days ago claiming that it was in fact in-game. Truth or fiction? Can’t say as of now, all we can do is wait and watch.
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Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans

Cashing in on the success of Warcraft, developer Blizzard decided to offer a different change of pace to fans of the series with Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a point and click adventure game set in the Warcraft universe that took place after the events of Warcraft II’s expansion pack, The Dark Portal. The game was to follow the life and exploits of Thrall, a young Orc raised to be a gladiator by a human lieutenant. Fed up with the way things are going, Thrall escapes from captivity to travel the land of Azeroth hoping to find out the true details of his origin as well as freeing other such oppresses Orcs. Slated for a 1997 release, this game was to highlight the softer side of the Orc race (didn’t even know they had one), but it suffered from a plethora of problems as a result of which Blizzard canned this game in 1998.
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Starcraft Ghost

As opposed to the whole strategy thing Starcraft had going on for itself, Starcraft Ghost was to be a third person action game set in that very same universe. Players would control a Terra Ghost (a psionic espionage agent – Wikipedia) as she went around the glazy kicking ass and from what was shown of the game it looked a lot like what Dark Sector would have been, had they stuck to the whole futuristic stealth based gameplay. The game was first announced way back in 2002 after which it was postponed nearly six times during which most of the team left the project. The game was also to be developed across three platforms; the Gamecube, the Xbox and the PS2, but in 2005 Blizzard finally cancelled development on all those platforms; however they claim (tease would be a better word) that they are in the process of developing a new Starcraft game for next gen consoles, which could turn out to be Starcraft Ghost.
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Phantom Console

Announced way back in 2003 as “the ultimate gaming experience that offers end-to-end, on-demand game distribution”, Infinium Lab’s Phantom Console was to bet the most definitive console that would allow gamers to download a variety of games from the net (much like IGN’s Direct to Drive service) without going through the hassle of actually procuring a game disc. After being stuck in development limbo for nearly three years, the game’s creators have lost nearly $62.7 million over this project as a result of which they’ve canned this project in favor of a digital distribution service (which hopefully won’t add up in our next vaporware list) just like Valve’s Steam.

Not that this would affect your life, but just for your knowledge, this is what the specs of this console were (once again, thanks to wikipedia.com):

• CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
• Video card: Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, with 128 MB RAM
• RAM: 256 MB
• Hard drive: 80 GB
• Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio
• Control: Custom game pad and keyboard-mouse combination unit called a “lapboard”