Before South Park: The Stick of Truth got it right, there were several attempts at a South Park game, ranging from mediocre to terrible. But there was one that was so bad, we didn’t know about until a decade after it was supposed to come out, thanks to a rare Xbox.
Video game historians digging around in a debug Xbox came across what appears to be a South Park video game from 2005 that was in development and never saw release. It’s not a passion project, either; it’s a bit too extensive for that. It’s more or less Sleeping Dogs; you steal cars, drive to locations, and beat up enemies. It’s also pretty easy to see why this got spiked before it ever saw a game console; while the ideas aren’t bad, the graphics are clearly stock models that got squashed down and slapped with a “South Park” skin, something that only becomes magnified when Cartman starts acrobatically goomba-stomping dogs and pulling out a Shoryuken.
That said, there is some curiosity about why the game was canceled, and why it appears to have been buried so deep, nobody even heard of it before this summer. It was far enough along in development that the basic game world had been built, some voicework had been recorded for a cutscene, and all four main characters had been rendered. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are notoriously protective of their work, which may be part of it, but there’s likely more to this story we’ve yet to uncover.
(Via Kotaku)