Rockstar Cancels A Game
That’s the news. The news wasn’t that it was Snow, because nobody cared about Snow— in fact, that’s probably the first time you ever heard about it. Even the completist GameSpot couldn’t care less: it has just two pieces of information about it: its showing at E3 2005 and the cancellation— and the former was so buzz-unworthy they used Bethany Massimilla to cover it.
Why the lack of interest? Because it was a cel-shaded tycoon game about running drugs with card-based battle sequences. Sure, that may sound interesting— until I tell you that this was not the idea of a lovably crazy Japanese man, but rather a company whose previous release was an expansion pack for Tropico 2. It’s quite probable that a random number generator figured heavily into the design phase, and in fact Snow was the one picked over the other finalist, a first-person survival horror game about running drugs, with battles resolved via horse racing.
Of course a plausible reason for the game’s cancellation, therefore, was obviously…that Rockstar felt the game was going to be too controversial. So instead of making it run-of-the-mill controversial— like their recently shipped PS2 port of the decapitated-with-spurting-neck simulator Liberty City Stories— and raking in cash, they decided to scrap what was surely a profitable game to avoid their public image taking a beating beyond their current comfort level of “embodiment of the culturally mephitic evil of the game industry.”
Here’s a more plausible conjecture derived from the events: Rockstar cancels Snow. Snow cancels school. Therefore, Rockstar wants there to be more school, and Bully is currently being re-worked as an edutainment title to be provided free as a public service. Post that, Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid, etc.
June 9th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Good riddance, I say. Frog City was responsible for Imperialism, one of the truly great and innovative strategy games in the post-Civ era that cut its own path. AFAIK, the same people are still in charge. When they failed to develop the mythology sim Pantheon I hoped they would eventually move on to something equally cool.
But we got a lame GTA ripoff that seemed to have nothing going for it. I’d have settled for an update of the promising but unfulfilling Trade Empires. Or another Tropico game. But gangstas was what it was all about. Hopefully the failure of True Crime and the cancellation of Snow will stem the glut of “be a badass” games.
Of course, this might mean the end for Frog City altogether and I hate to see developers close, even if they’ve lost their way. Do they have anything else in the pipeline?