If you could bring any one cancelled game "back from the dead" (i.e. see it completed) which would you pick?
I'm still kind of a Prey 2 truther. I don't know if it would have been the greatest game ever made, but I think that development team got done real dirty.
As the story goes, Bethesda commissioned Human Head Studios to make Prey 2, the sequel to the original 2007 game (the one where you play as a Native American that gets swept up in an interstellar invasion).
The idea is that after the invasion in Prey 1, the world is forever changed, and humanity is begrudgingly opened up to the world of space travel. You would play as a former airline pilot fitting in to his new role as a bounty hunter, meeting a wide array of alien races for the first time, and doing assassination missions in an open alien galaxy. It sounded insanely ahead of its time and a little too good to be true.
According to the information that's out there, Bethesda employed a known tactic with Human Head. Bethesda allegedly had ulterior motives, and was using Prey 2 as a way to liquidate Human Head in order to soften them up for a buyout. I believe the tactic was that Bethesda would promise development resources, and then short Human Head some of the money, which would force Human Head to dip in to company funds. Once Bethesda was sure Human Head had spent most of their own assets to keep Prey 2 afloat, they would effectively engage in a hostile takeover -- buy the whole company outright. Only after buying Human Head would they deliver their promised funds.
Human Head was reportedly not happy about this and did not want to be bought by Bethesda, so once it became obvious what Bethesda was doing, they refused to play ball and the game was effectively canceled.
When Human Head slipped through their hands, Bethesda washed their hands of the whole Prey franchise and rebooted it in to something completely different (supposedly Arkane Studios was working on a System Shock reboot that they then just renamed "Prey").
No matter how many people say Arkane's Prey is good, I think about what happened to Human Head and I keep my distance from it out of principal.
I mean, from what I remember hearing, if you own Prey 2007 on Steam and install Arkane's Prey, it actually installs over the 2007 version. You can't have both games installed at the same time. That's pretty gross.
