Have you ever done something, but had no memory of it? Volition has, recently a PSP dev kit containing an unreleased Saints Row game was uncovered in a Volition storage room. The game was discovered by Volition’s Associate Video Editor Josh Stinson, who immediately wanted to share his discovery.
He began to ask around to see what he could find to discover that most had never heard of the game and the few senior members of the team who knew of it said that it shouldn’t be shown. Their reasoning for this was that the game was unfinished and was on a PSP, which didn’t look great at the best of times.
We have it so good now with the graphics that when we look at a PSP game it’s just like “Oh gosh how can it be that way”.
– Video Producer Alexander Mejia
Volition only likes to use final concept art and final screenshots when showing off a game says Community Manager Mike Watson in the Inside Volition video (see below). Still Stinson and his colleagues pushed and, obviously, they got the go ahead.
In the video, Mejia explains that the game started out as a port of Saints Row 2 before “Old THQ” (how Volition refers to the now defunct THQ) realized that they couldn’t do it and from there the game was retooled and made into a separate entity.
There is no concrete reason for why the game was cancelled other than it wasn’t up to snuff according to THQ and Volition’s higher ups. Watson explains,
Volition isn’t a handheld developer, so when projects like this come up we get an outside studio to work on it, and Volition is very involved with the review process. Both “Old THQ” and Volition looked at the project and after multiple reviews felt that it really wasn’t living up to what a Saints Row game could and should be.
In the early days of the game’s development it was called by the codename Saints Row 2: PSP, then Saints Row: The Fall, before the dev team finally settled on the name Saints Row: Undercover. Before it was canned the game was actually pretty far along. The game had an open world map, a tutorial mission and minor player customization along with guns and cars for the player to use.
If your interested, Volition will be streaming Saints Row: Undercover to give people a look at an unreleased Saints Row title and a look behind the curtain into the development of a game.
The stream will be on January 28th 5PM ET/ 2PM PT/ 22:00 GMT on twitch.tv/dsvolition