Blizzard shocked a bunch of people this past week by announcing they were cancelling a game nobody really knew was in development. An MMORPG unconnected from their crazy popular World Of Warcraft title, Titan was known only to the Blizzard obsessives who had picked up on subtle clues to its existence years before it was officially announced...alongside its cancellation. Before that whole saga, however, Blizzard had suffered through the very public and very strange production cycle of Starcraft: Ghost, a spin-off of one of their earlier RPG titles which would've taken the company in a very different direction. We say "if" because, after almost a decade of hearing about the third-person sci-fi shooter and three switches of developers, we're still no closer to playing it. And chances are we never will be. Announced in 2002 and set to be developed by Nihilistic Software for the Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2, Blizzard pushed the release date of Ghost back repeatedly, responsibility for the title was handed over to Swingin' Ape Studios in 2004 before Blizzard bought the company, and plans for the GameCube version were cancelled in 2005. So that's already three years down the pan. In March 2006 Blizzard claimed it was on "indefinite hold", and that it might appear on the current generation of consoles instead. It was only this year that studio CEO Mike Morhaime confirmed that Ghost was officially cancelled. Which sucks because it looked like it could've been a lot of fun, taking the cool Starcraft setting from the slow-paced real time strategy arena to a more fast-paced action genre. All we've got to go in is a handful of reports and, weirdly, a prequel novella called Starcraft Ghost: Nova about the main character's back story.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
