With their departure, the game formerly known as Full Throttle: Payback began its symbolic transformation into Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, which, in this case, was actually made public by LucasArts itself, but shared the same luck as its previous stage, Payback.

It is worth to point out at this point, that these two games were not independent projects, as popular belief states, but rather two versions of the same development, since there was a reorganization of the project: Sean Clark took charge of Hell on Wheels, taking as a base part of the work already done months before with Payback, but tipping the balance even more towards the beat ‘em up genre. It should be noted, then, that Payback was not ever anything more than a console hybrid game, and Hell on Wheels an action game, with an adventurous big guy as a main character.

LucasArts made an official statement about the development of the game, and the reaction of the adventure community (the audience of Full Throttle) showed up a cold response. Not only they were not willing to spend their money in an action game but also felt insulted by LucasArts trying to talk them into believing it was and adventure with ambiguous statements. The term “action adventure” has never been well received by adventure game fans, and it coming from LucasArts was little less than a catastrophe. All in all, the sequel to Ben’s adventures was still going forward, ignoring any discordant voices, maybe because they already had their own “internal affairs”: “[After I left] Chris Miles became Art Director. I did not work there but what I heard was the game was not looking too good because Sean let his lead game designer control the art as well as the game design. So that may be why it looked so bad. I was surprised that it looked so bad, I really was. Chris is an excellent animator. But art came out of that project that, to me, did not look like it belonged in a Full Throttle game. Plus the style seemed more pedestrian now, and was missing the elements that made the first Full Throttle so cool and unique”.

While the game was drawing its final shape, the first images appeared on paper magazines, the first screenshots, and to be honest, Tiller was somewhat right: it did not look so well. Square characters, bad animation, poor textures, empty scenarios and an engine that was not up to the circumstances. In view of the situation, it was not only the adventure gamer who was not going to be satisfied with the product, but all those polygon-freaks were about to tear the game apart even before its release.

The E3 came, and that was when the game received its “coup de grace”. A new video was made public (which you can watch right below) in which we were able to take a look at what could Hell on Wheels be. Not only there was not anything new in it, but the expected spectacularity was not also that impressive. The concept of the game was very similar of that of a 3D Double Dragon with bike races. Even the printed press, whose criteria is not exactly the most honest of all, felt reluctant to accept Full Throttle 2: “Apparently the game was ‘peer reviewed’ and it did not show too well, and RTX Red Rock had just come out and sold horribly and got reviewed horribly”, Tiller confesses, “So LucasArts decided not to release another bad game and canceled it. That was the Hell on Wheels title”.

LucasArts, with all due diplomacy, avoided the compromising details and through a statement said: “We do not want to disappoint the many fans of Full Throttle, and hope everyone can understand how committed we are to delivering the best-quality gaming experience that we possibly can”. Strange words coined by Simon Jeffery, the man who gave the green light to a console hybrid on the franchise because an adventure for the PC would not sell well enough…

Finally, Full Throttle ended up out of the road, maybe a good place for Ben, who is still waiting for someone to fix his bike properly…

#video1

You can see unpublished and exclusive images, but also already known ones, of Payback, images of Hell on Wheels and more information on both titles in their respective rapsheets.

Many thanks to Bill Tiller and The International House of Mojo.

Page 3 of 3

« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next »