Vaporware: Difference between revisions

** There was also a ''Castlevania'' title in development for the Sega 32X that also got canned when it was obvious that the system was not selling; some of its spritework was recycled for ''[[Symphony of the Night]]'' and ''[[Portrait of Ruin]]''.

* A very meta example: ''[[Makai Kingdom]]'' included a preview of the next game's protagonist, Asagi, as a bonus character. Her game, ''Makai Wars'', has never surfaced so she's become a running gag who [[Hostile Show Takeover|attempts to take over other games for her own]]. In-universe, ''Makai Wars'' was being worked on as a movie for well over a hundred years and ''[[Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories]]'''s Remake's Axel Mode, tells us that it was scrapped during or after the game, and they skipped directly to ''Makai Wars 2''.

* It is a very common trope in independent game makers to plan out plots or characters and sometimes go as far as produce screenshots or artwork, only for the place updates of the game are posted on to go from frequent to quiet and for the game to eventually (and quietly) be dropped (a common red flag is when the latter updates over-emphasize how close it is to completion or something along the lines of "we're not dead, we're still workin' on it!", yet no real progress is shown otherwise). It is common because the core idea of the game was usually done out of a quick jolt of inspiration or impulse, and, among other reasons, die either because the creator's interest in the game waned, it turned out to be too much work (and if the engine in question isn't freeware or fully freeware, costly) than they expected, conflicting thoughts between the group (especially if the original creator was more dis-organized, inexperienced or [[Small Name, Big Ego|holier than thou]] than the rest of the dev team they hired), personal reasons (school, work, personal life, we've all heard it before), or legal reasons (especially if said work was a fanfic embodied in a game, was a painfully obvious cut-and-paste of another source, or was meant as a fan-remake of another game). It has come to a point now that if there was someone out there that plotted out ideas for a game and was looking for a team, most would more than likely say "screenshots/demo/(privately-transferred-)prototype or it isn't serious." It is especially common in community boards dedicated to freeware game-making programs such as RPG Maker, Game Maker, DS Maker, Ren'py, Blade, Novelty, some ROM hack projects and tools, and so on.

* ''Nexus: The Jupiter Incident'', produced by Mithis and HD Publishing, released way back in 2005, was scedualed to have a Nexus 2 come out later in 2007. Its 2011. Many claim that no ship-to-ship space combat sim produced since has ever rivaled it, yet only a crusty layer of dust-caked die-hards can even remember its name. This is probably past vaporware by now...