3. This Is Vegas
Why We Want To Play It:Did you want an R-rated Sims game? This is Vegas was billing itself to be Second Life type of game for consoles. The E3 trailers of the game made it look like a brotastic time. Early gameplay footage displayed the variety of missions your character would take on. Liven up boring clubs with your dance skills (mostly inspired by Michael Jackson), fight guys who wanted to mess with you, and celebrate by hosting a wet t-shirt contest. Graphically, the game looked solid and seemed to have its own flair of raunchy humor. Gambling, drinking, bartending, and racing were other features that Midway and Surreal Software planned to put into the game.
Why We Never Will:Midway fell into financial shambles while This Is Vegas was in production. These problems, in addition to the $50 million that had already been spent on the game, gave new owner Warner Bros. Interactive plenty of reason to think the game would not succeed. Maybe it seemed too ambitions. The few videos of gameplay we are able to see dont seem to even touch the iceberg as to what Surreal and Midway intended to do with this game. At the time, Warner Bros. Interactive had also not released too many open world games that didnt have some kind of license to back them (Matrix Online, etc.) Looks like the whole city of Vegas in a video game did not have the luster WB needed to release it.