Jeff Minter's psychedelic GameCube shooter will not see the light of day.
In a posting on his popular "YakYak" forums today, veteran software designer and programmer Jeff Minter announced that his pet project, Unity for GameCube, has been canceled. The decision was made with the publisher, Peter Molyneaux's Lionhead Studios, in the past two weeks.
Minter had been working on the game, alone, for the past two years. Conceived from the start as a GameCube-exclusive title, Unity was a shooter with psychedelic, randomly generated landscapes that appeared in screenshots to play similarly to another Minter classic: Tempest.
Here is an excerpt from the press release:
Commenting on the decision to halt work on Unity, Peter Molyneux said, “Everyone at Lionhead has the utmost respect and admiration for Jeff’s unique talents. However, we’ve both been in the industry a long time and it was becoming increasingly apparent to us that we would not be able to finish Unity in an acceptable time frame. On a personal level, I have very much enjoyed working with Jeff.”
Jeff Minter responded, “Everyone at Lionhead has been incredibly supportive and the decision to stop working on Unity has been a difficult one for us. But being realistic, I felt it was better for everyone concerned that we cease work on Unity. I’d like to thank Lionhead for all their help and support over the past two years.”
On his forums, Minter added these words:
It’s been a horrible decision for us to have to make, but in the end we’ve had to make it. Basically, although I’ve built a shedload of stuff for Unity in the past couple of years it’s become clear that getting it all together into something that I’d be happy to call Unity and put my name to was going to take a lot of time and effort both from myself and the guys at Lionhead, and realistically it was becoming unlikely that it’d be finished in time for anyone to want to publish it on Gamecube. The alternative would be a rush job and we simply didn’t want to do that. Best to call it a day.
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