The New Mutants: Four Games that Changed Drastically During Development
Things don't always go according to plan—especially when it comes to video games.
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Too Human | Silicon Knights | Xbox 360 | 2008
Too Human might have entered the world with a massive "THUD" when it launched for the Xbox 360, but this troubled creation had been in the works for years and years before that. Typically, when development of a game spans two console generations, you know something went wrong. Too Human spanned a total of THREE, meaning things couldn't possibly go wronger for this Silicon Knights game.
In May of 1999, Too Human was unveiled as a 3D RPG which boasted "no load times"—a pretty ambitious promise in an era beset with this issue. Arriving in the wake of world-disrupting RPGs like Final Fantasy VII, this first version of Too Human would span five discs and contain an impressive amount of pre-rendered cut scenes—which was the style at the time. Much of the information about the PlayStation version of Too Human has been lost to the decay of Ye Olde Internet, but we at least know Silicon Knights intended to tell a Blade Runner-inspired revenge story about a cyborg cop—clearly, very far from what the final version of the game would actually be. (And we at least have a single, cruddy YouTube video to prove it once existed.)
As Eternal Darkness slipped from the Nintendo 64 to the upcoming GameCube, Too Human moved to this platform as well. But outside of an appearance during a Space World 2000 sizzle reel, all that remains of the GameCube Too Human amounts to a handful of screenshots which indicate the game hadn't yet left its Blade Runner aspirations behind.
Silicon Knights was never known for their speediness, and the two games they produced during the GameCube era—Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes—kept them occupied for the console's entire lifespan. Too Human would later move to the Xbox 360, but missed its projected release date of Holiday '06 by roughly two years. By the time Too Human launched in 2008, Silicon Knights' founder Denis Dyack did much to poison the well by reacting to criticism of the game with fiery Internet tirades. And, ultimately, it was much ado about nothing: While Too Human's cyber-Norse aesthetic would make for a much more inspired choice than its previous form, the final version amounted to a mediocre-at-best dungeon slog.