Planet of the Apes Dreamcast crashes on an Unreleased planet.
Who does not know the first Planet of the Apes film from 1968? Granted, that was 53 years ago!
My father introduced me to this masterpiece of science fiction cinema when I was a child. Charlton Eston , the star actor, played the role of an astronaut crashing into an unknown planet ruled by evolved apes. This unknown world was nothing other than our land in the distant future where humans, from slaves, had become primitive beings. The final scene is masterful with Charlton Eston falling to his knees in front of the remains of the Statue of Liberty while lambasting humanity for destroying its own world.
Since then, the franchise has included many other films and derivative products. It was only fitting that the Planet of the Apes appeared in video games. The Fox , now bought by The Walt Disney Company , entrusted the portage of the work of the writer Pierre Boulle to the French studio Visiware founded by Laurent Weill .
The game, which was to accompany the release of the next Saga film, was based on the story of the franchise's first feature film. No scenario had yet been selected for the new film from Fox , the developers had been forced to create their own stories. The gameplay was inspired by the Tomb Raider series. Announced in 1997 for the Playstation and the Saturn , after long delays, the game will finally be released in 2001 for PC and PS1 . The Saturn and Dreamcast versions, which were originally planned, will eventually be canceled.
By playing Ulysses , a human who crashed on the Planet of the Apes , the player would have to go through fifteen levels grouped into 70 sub-levels, the game was immense. Many weapons were placed at his disposal to fight and ensure his survival. The adventure was not left aside as Ulysses had to solve a number of puzzles. During his journey, he was going to be able to converse with an impressive number of non-player characters, Visiware promised no less than 2000 lines of dialogue.
Planet of the Apes was a multi-platform game, that is to say the same video game adapted to the technological capacities of the different consoles. It was due out for the first quarter of 2001.
For convenience, the developers worked on PC first. The PS1 and DC versions were ports, very reduced in graphics resolution for the PSOne but identical for the Dreamcast .
The port to the latest Sega console was based on WindowsCE / DirectX and not on the native OS (the fastest solution but not the most efficient). The prototype offered a fairly average refresh rate.
.jpg)
The DC version was canceled for marketing reasons. Producer " Fox " thought the game was not going to sell.
Although Visiware made daily updates, tested immediately, Planet of Apes DC was canceled rather quickly. The best Dreamcast version was not as successful as the PC version .
The PC version was released hastily to coincide with the film's release. The PSOne port was tweaked for a few more months to match Christmas !
We can assume that the stage of development of Planet of the Apes on Dreamcast had gone beyond that of a simple tech demo. Don't expect a full game, certainly just a few playable levels.
In 1989 came out on Amiga , Atari ST and Commodore 64 " Stunt Car Racer ", a cult game using 3D. For lovers of old computers, according to the words of an employee of the French studio, his prototype was worn in a super-playable way on classic Xbox !!!
Thanks to a developer for shedding light on this Unreleased game from the Dreamcast.
.jpg)
In my research at Unreleased, I had the opportunity to interview some developers. I took the opportunity to devote articles about these canceled games with new information:
