The appearance of some canceled games on the internet has surprised everyone. We will remember "Ring: The Nibelungen Ring" (its online release to be read here) as well as "Dear Avengers" which was not mentioned anywhere. How many of them still exist?
In 2018, a developer of "Bitmap Bureau" to whom we owe the excellent homebrew "Xeno Crisis" had interacted with the community of a facebook group dedicated to the Dreamcast . He gave us a well kept secret for 17 years.
At that time, he worked for the Studio "Io Production" which developed the English exclusive "Giant Killer", a dreamcast title appreciated by the fullsetteurs of the White Lady. Bitmap Studio is mainly composed of former employees of Io Production.
He revealed that he had been working on an aborted project called "Stampede" . The initial work had started in 1998 for PC and was to be published by "Infogrames".
It was common, at the end of the nineties, to consider porting PC games to Dreamcast.
The player had to take control of a farmer and his faithful sheep dog. The main goal of the game was to use the farmer's instructions to his dog, carefully keeping the sheep (and later other exotic animals) in pens within a set time limit.
His testimony aroused the interest of Dreamcast fans. We wanted to know more, we wanted to play it!
He was able to get his hands on the code of the game which, it seems, was not compiled. Some DC lovers, including me, offered to finish our dev kit and disc writter in order to finish the work and burn a fake prototype to facilitate his dump.
The game not belonging to Bitmap Bureau, they were not able to put it online. The desire was there to please us.
They have no choice but to follow a legal path to offer us this cancellation. As professionals, they can not proceed otherwise.
Since then, things have evolved. The game has been compiled, you can see a brief overview of gameplay in the video below (from 5 minutes 17 ) .
By the end of 2020, they were able to make it work. They wanted to know how complete the game was in order to distribute it as a cheap limited version. The Copyright is still a brake knowing that Infogrames had been bought by Atari.
They do their best to make us still dream 20 years later! We will have to be patient.
My other articles about cancelled games : Planet of the Apes (dreamcast) - Shenmue 2 Us (dreamcast) - Stampede (dreamcast) - Dee Dee Planet Dreamcast - Riders (concept) - One Online for PC and Flame Busters Xbox Classic