There’s perhaps no industry as weird as the software industry, and nothing weirder about it than how people can actually become supportive of software that doesn’t exist.
Probably the most egregious example is “Duke Nukem Forever,” which has been just about ready for release since 1997. “Harpoon 4” was promised for a couple of years and then quietly died.
Of course, some games should have stayed vaporware; “Master of Orion 3” was two or three years too late, and when it finally came out, it was a disaster.
I recall claims from the 3DO people that they were going to produce a “holodeck” program for it that would produce, well, holodeck type simulated worlds on your 3DO. Never happened, of course.
I recall an ad in Compute many years ago for a system called Spartan which was to allow you to run Apple ][ software on your Commodore 64. I have read web sites where people swear they saw actual Spartans, but I don’t believe it.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is an interesting looking game, but I refuse to get excited about it until I have the box firmly in hand. The game, to be poilite, has had slight delays and setbacks in the course of development.
A lot of people feel this way, but I don’t consider the game to be vaporware. There are more than 545 screenshots available, half a dozen movies, and a thriving online community. None of this can be said for any vaporware game. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is obviously too far into development for them to write it off now. The release date has been officially set for the first quarter of 2007.
Frankly I’m glad that they’re taking all the time they need to get the game right. I WISH more game developers did this. I’m damn sick of buggy-ass, release-now-patch-later games. Way too many PC games are being rushed out too fast, like Hitman:Blood Money, full of glitches and gaffes. Kudos to GSC for taking their time on this one.
There has also been talk for years about a new Elite, a Starflight 3, Space Quest 7 and Sam & Max 2. Lies, all lies, believed by poor, sad, crushable fools.
The C64 was perhaps slightly more powerful than the Apple ][, but using one to emulate the other is probably impossible, except for trivially small programs. The emulator would take up most of the 64 KB of memory, and unlike modern computers, even if you had a hard drive it was way too slow to use as virtual memory. That concept probably hadn’t even been thought up yet.
Except Team Fortress 2 will actually be coming out soon, just like Prey! Of course , it looks like the “original” Team Fortress 2 was completely scrapped and they started over with a totally different concept for it.
Considering that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was supposed to be a Half-Life 2 killer from before HL2 was even delayed the first time, I think it’s fair to say that it’s nudging into vapor territory. Thriving fan communities are exactly what make vaporware so vapory-crazy! You think planetdukenukem wasn’t hard core at one point, or that all their screenshots weren’t lovingly analyzed?
I believe Electronic Arts cancelled Simsville because SimCity 4 had very similar features- combining The Sims with SimCity.
When Mattel Electronics released the Intellivision in 1980, the catalog promised a keyboard component would be released in 1981. 1981 came and went, and with the exception of a few test markets, the Intellivision Keyboard Component never showed up. That Christmas, Jay Leno joked at the Mattel company party that the three big lies are “The check’s in the mail,” “I’ll respect you in the morning,” and “The Keyboard Component will be out by spring.” It turned out the Keyboard Component was too expensive for Mattel to provide support for. 4,000 were made, and Mattel offered to buy them back after support was dropped. (For those not willing to part with it, they were forced to sign a waiver stating that Mattel would no longer provide technical support.) Since some Keyboard Components were out there, the FCC investigated Mattel for consumer fraud, and threatened to fine them $10,000 a month. Mattel released a smaller keyboard called the Entertainment Computer System in 1983 to appease the FCC. However, the Intellivision’s days were numbered- by 1984, as a victim of the video game crash, Mattel Electronics closed its doors. (Most of the information in this paragraph comes from the official website of Intellivision Productions, Inc., with some information coming from The Official® Price Guide to Classic Video Games by David Ellis [New York: Random House/House of Collectibles, 2004].)
Even though I’ve played Nintendo games all my life, I haven’t really researched these three vaporware add-ons that never appeared (at least in the United States) as much as the rare Intellivision Keyboard Component:
NES Modem. Nintendo had plans to create a modem that connected to the NES. Although this was done in Nintendo’s home country of Japan, such a modem never made it to the United States.
SNES CD-ROM Drive. Nintendo romanced three companies with ideas for a CD-ROM drive that would attach to the Super NES. Neither of the three companies’s ideas ever made it to market in Japan or the United States. One of the three companies Nintendo teamed up with was Sony. Their joint CD-ROM drive would have been called PlayStation, a name Sony took when they developed their own stand-alone CD-based video game system.
Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD). Although released in Japan, this add-on never made it to the United States. (Mention should also be made of the Famicom Disk System, which Nintendo abandoned in Japan after a few years and worked solely with cartridges. Classic NES games such as Metroid and The Legend of Zelda originally appeared in Nintendo’s home country as Famicom Disks.)