Announced, developed, and then shelved — the games that never made it
Star Fox 2 was a fully complete and bug-tested sequel to Star Fox for the SNES that Nintendo shelved in 1995 to protect anticipation for the N64's polygon graphics, remaining officially unreleased for 22 years before appearing on the SNES Classic Mini in 2017.
Mother 3 spent six years in development as a Nintendo 64 title before Nintendo cancelled it in August 2000, citing scope and timeline problems; a scaled-down Game Boy Advance version was released in Japan in 2006 and never officially localised for Western markets.
Dinosaur Planet was Rare's ambitious N64 action-adventure featuring original protagonists Sabre and Krystal on a world of warring dinosaur tribes, which Shigeru Miyamoto personally requested be reframed as a Star Fox game — it shipped as Star Fox Adventures on GameCube in 2002.
Thrill Kill was a completed four-player PlayStation fighting game featuring extreme violence that Electronic Arts refused to publish after acquiring developer Virgin Interactive, cancelling a finished and gold-mastered product weeks before its scheduled release.
Sonic X-treme was Sega's long-gestating attempt to bring Sonic into 3D on the Saturn, a project that cycled through multiple engine designs and development crises over three years before cancellation in 1996, leaving the Saturn as the only Sega platform without a mainline Sonic game.
Castlevania: Resurrection was a 3D Castlevania game announced for the Sega Dreamcast featuring returning character Sonia Belmont and new protagonist Victor Belmont, cancelled by Konami in February 2000 as the Dreamcast's commercial trajectory deteriorated.
Announced in April 1997, Duke Nukem Forever spent over a decade in development at 3D Realms, cycling through multiple complete engine rebuilds, becoming gaming's most famous development hell, and eventually shipping in 2011 under Gearbox Software to poor reviews.
SimMars was an ambitious Maxis simulation of establishing and managing a colony on Mars — conceived in the mid-1990s as a natural extension of the SimEarth and SimCity lineage — that was cancelled before release as Electronic Arts acquired Maxis and redirected the studio toward The Sims.
Project Dream was Rare's original SNES RPG concept featuring a boy named Edison, which migrated to the N64 over several years and underwent such fundamental redesign that its final protagonist — a bear named Banjo — became the lead of an entirely different game: Banjo-Kazooie.
Following the commercial success of Shadows of the Empire on N64, LucasArts began development on a sequel that would have continued Dash Rendar's story, but cancelled the project as focus shifted to The Phantom Menace tie-in game and the N64's window narrowed.
After releasing ClayFighter 63⅓ and a Blockbuster-exclusive expanded version on the N64, Interplay planned a true sequel that would address the original's technical shortcomings with a rewritten engine, a project that collapsed with Interplay's financial deterioration in the late 1990s.
The Last Soldier was an ambitious 3D action-shooter developed for the Atari Jaguar by Imagitec Design — one of the console's more capable third-party developers — that was cancelled as Atari's commercial collapse made continued Jaguar development commercially non-viable.
A fully-voiced 2D point-and-click adventure starring a young Thrall, cancelled by Blizzard weeks before E3 1998 despite being nearly finished — because they judged the gameplay already out of date.
A finished Sega AM2 aerial-combat game pulled from its September 2001 release when its city-based dogfighting levels became unthinkable days after the September 11 attacks.
Black Isle Studios’ codename for the "real" Fallout 3 — a turn-based isometric RPG cancelled in December 2003 as Interplay collapsed, later reincarnated in spirit as Fallout: New Vegas.
A groundbreaking shooter built around real-time portal technology, so far ahead of its hardware that 3D Realms cycled through designers and scrapped it for years before a wholly new team finally released Prey in 2006.
The first attempt at a fully 3D polygonal Sonic game, built for the 32X and named after the add-on's "Project Mars" codename — abandoned when the 32X collapsed, and dragged onto the Saturn where it became the doomed Sonic X-treme.
The third Zelda Oracle game, planned alongside Ages and Seasons as a linked trilogy — cancelled because making three games talk to each other proved impossible to debug.
A cheerful, family-friendly Rare platformer starring a cute squirrel — cancelled because it was indistinguishable from every other Mario 64 clone, and reborn as one of the most obscene games Nintendo ever published.