Origin Games That Weren't: Silverheart (March 6, 2016)

[KrisV]

In 1995, while he was finishing Wing Commander IV, Chris Roberts had another live-action video game in pre-production at Origin. Silverheart was to be a third person action-adventure game in a post-apocalyptic/medieval setting. It never materialized, but a tie-in novel outlined by English multiverse author Michael Moorcock was published in 2005. Now, director of photography Layton Blaylock is offering us a glimpse of what might have been with the test footage below. Thanks to Joe from the Origin Museum for the heads-up!



In an interview with G4 from several years ago, Chris Roberts provided some more insight into Silverheart's production history:

Roberts had also planned to work on a third person action-adventure title called Silverheart, set in a universe created by famed English fantasy author Michael Moorcock. a??[Moorcock] was one of my favorite fantasy novelists. It serendipitously turned out that hea??d moved to near Austin, so Ia??d contracted him to create this world and write a script for me. I actually had Silverheart in early pre-production while we were doing Wing Commander IV. Silverheart was going to be my project right after Wing Commander III.a?? Electronic Arts came knocking for a fourth Wing Commander game immediately after the third title in the series, however, which ended up pushing back Silverhearta??s development.
Roberts negotiated to get the rights to Silverheart back from Electronic Arts while doing the deal for the Wing Commander movie, and planned to produce the fantasy game after Freelancera??s completion. a??Of course I never got around to doing Silverheart, because I sold Digital Anvil to Microsoft and went off to do movies,a?? Roberts said.

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Original update published on March 6, 2016

 

[Mindcrime]

Man this would have been sooooo cool!!!

 

[Quarto]

Cool? Hmm, yes. It definitely would have been pretty awesome, but in that very peculiar, corny way in which games like Crusader were awesome. And I mean, if it was a third person action-adventure game, and was being developed around 1996 at Origin, then it quite conceivably could have been intended to basically be a medieval fantasy Crusader. I'd definitely be all for that.