During the early 2000’s, Midway was developing a game known as Crank the Weasel. According to various forum posts and other searching, the game seemed to function as a mix between Conker’s Bad Fur Day and an old cartoon from the 1920’s-1930’s.
The game received a brief showing at E3 2002 and was scheduled to release in 2003, but ended up getting canceled before it could launch. In a weird twist, however, the lead artist of the game has recently taken to a forum to share a playable PC demo of the game.
The lead artist of the unreleased game Crank the Weasel has released a playable PC demo and assets!https://t.co/hlNVvVpmYz pic.twitter.com/PEpCE59XOi
— Dagu (@TheDaguar) October 12, 2017
Shared to the Assembler Games forum, Eric Browning – the lead artist in question – took to a post about the canceled game promising to answer questions. According to Browning, the game was “pretty far along” in development, and he also shared some storyboard images that hadn’t been seen by anyone.
However, the real surprise came when he released the actual demo files and assets of the game, allowing people to get their hands on it for the very first time. Judging from the posts on the forum, it seems like the demo is able to run with sound, music, and widescreen mode enabled. Sadly, there doesn’t seem much to actually do, but it’s still pretty cool to see something that was thought to be lost forever make its way back to the public.
You can check out the full forum discussion by heading over to the Assembler Games forum.
