Fireteam Rogue

Fireteam Rogue is a unreleased game, but it holds a place in my heart. At one point in time, I considered abandoning this website, and used an article on this game as a sort of swan song for my website. Fireteam Rogue

However, after the positive response to the article (Frank Cifaldi at Lost Levels went as far as calling me the “esteemed SNES scholar”), I decided to keep working on it, and produced the layout and database system you see now. Thinking back, this is something of a turning point that led me to truly make this website my hobby, especially when it comes to unreleased and prototype games.

One of the most appealing things about this unreleased game is the plethora of concept art, much of it available on the late Betty Cunningham’s website. The story of this game is interesting because of the scale of what the developers were trying to accomplish, and the resulting cancellation due to personality conflicts and delays. Fireteam Rogue

Over-ambition – Fireteam Rogue

Fireteam Rogue’s cancellation is probably due to having too much ambition. The developers (or rather the people marketing the game) claimed it would have 100 hours of gameplay, and that the characters would be larger than in most other action games. Personality conflicts and poor management due to this goal seem to have taken their toll, as stated by Russell Borogove (Bornschlegel):

The project had a lot of problems in development. We spent a lot more time developing ridiculous data compression schemes to fit all the levels into the game, when we should have cut a couple of enemies and a handful of levels in order to get it done. There were also some personality conflicts that culminated with the producer of the project quitting when we were at beta. Shortly after that, the head of product development at Accolade asked us if we thought we should continue the project or not. It was unclear to me how much more work it was going to take to finish it and if the game was going to be good enough to compete in the market by the time we actually got it out, and I advised that we should shut it down. I don’t remember what the others said.