Stargate SG-1: The Alliance Scrapped
Posted by inpheaux on August 8th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
Good news and bad news for you today. Bad news: the FPS adaptation of Stargate SG-1, "The Alliance", has been scrapped. Good news: it's because the producers would rather ditch years of development if it prevents a horrible game from being released.
Here's what happened. MGM Interactive, the gaming wing of MGM and holders of the Stargate license, took said license to JoWooD Productions, an Austrian producer to have a game made based on the license. JoWooD then took the license to Perception Studios, an Australian developer with - as far as I can tell - no development history worth talking about. Perception then did . . well . . some stuff? Maybe? We're not sure, but they certainly seemed to have a pretty decent showing at E3 2005, and all the screenshots and videos I've seen appeared to be quite nice.
JoWooD apparently didn't agree, so they pulled the plug on the project. Apparently they had concerns about how long it's taken Perception to complete this, and how it doesn't look like the game would have been ready for it's expected October release date. Depending on where you read it, the title is either just "sorta dead and might be finished by some other dev if possible", "dead, but we're considering giving some other dev a chance to completely start over with the license", or "totally dead we're giving up, packing up all our toys, and going home. oh, and stop talking to us."
Personally, I'm leaning towards believing door #2. The license is too strong to just drop outright, and the nature of the series lends itself quite nicely to the FPS genre, it's just a matter of not being idiots and contracting it out to some noname developer as their first big project. I caution against option #1 because frankly, I can't think of too many recent examples where content has changed hands multiple times and the game has turned out good. The closest I can think of right now is Starcraft: Ghost, which I believe has now been through three companies, been in development 4-5 years, and STILL doesn't have a release date.
So I guess that's one less thing to scratch off my list for fall 2005. I was really rather looking forward to it, too, since I've become a Stargate fan ever since SciFi put it into heavy rotation. But then again, I'm glad they pulled the plug on it rather than cranking out some licensed-based shovelware. And on that note, I just hope they keep it the hell away from EA.
Source: JoWooD Press Release
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