Back in 2008, Eight Days, a third-person action title in development at SCE’s London Studio got the axe alongside their other PS3 exclusive, The Getaway. Richard Bunn, one of the individuals responsible for the game’s development, has hailed the title’s impressive feature set and “jaw-dropping” presentation.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Bunn said:
It had directed moments, which were big cinematic scenes similar to God of War. It had driving sections. It had duck and cover style gameplay. It was pretty spectacular. Some of the stuff that was never shown publicly would definitely have impressed if it had ever made it out into the public.
As to why a game this “spectacular” got canceled, Bunn went on to explain:
It was deemed that with the incredibly strong list of exclusive first party titles coming up both this year and in the near future, resource should be reallocated to enhance those projects closer to completion. It had been in pre-production for a long time and had soaked up a lot of money. You have to think back as well, this was when the PS3 was in its infancy and was considered overpriced and it wasn’t doing as well as Sony had hoped.
Eight Days had already cost a fair amount of money. They’d done their maths and said, ‘it’s going to cost this much to finish the project,’ which I’d rather not disclose. It was quite a bit. It was about another year’s worth of development, so you can probably work out roughly for a big game how much that might have come to. And then they basically said, projecting forward what the PS3 user base is going to be a year from now, you’re going to have to be way above the trend on user tie-in to make a profit.
The current state of the title still remains hazy. While Sony technically canceled the project, management informed the team that Eight Days was just “on hold” for the time being. If the game really does have the kind of potential that Bunn alluded to, let’s hope it gets resurrected in some form or another, but sadly, the longer Sony waits, the more outdated the game will be.
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