Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

Cancelled Windows version

A PC version was also announced but it was cancelled.

Development

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows underwent a major re-design in summer 2005. Watching Gamespot E3 videos (which present game before the re-design) offers a glimpse of the big changes that were done: For one thing, the game was originally planned to be very M-rated: The warrior could hack people in two, the valkyrie could decapitate people, enemies could be picked up and thrown into spikes, all with very bloody results. Also, the traps in the dungeon passage were all very lethal indeed (the saw blades for example would chop a careless creature into chunky little pieces of meat).

Another change is evident when looking at the credits and promotional footage for the game: Lead designer J. E. Sawyer (as well as early print ads) mentioned the epic storyline. In the credits, many names of the ACT3 studio can be seen - which usually provides Midway with pre-rendered FMV scenes. Also, in the E3 build, the game started with a two-minute cut-scene that used the ingame render engine.

The final game has none of this. This is because the actual number of levels is less than half of what was initially announced in previews, and since the missing levels created huge gaps in the storyline, the story was discarded altogether and replaced with a more generic plot. As evident from the credits, Josh Sawyer ended up asking to have his name removed. John Romero also was associated with the project, but left around the same time as Sawyer.

Engine

The game was originally developed with the RenderWare graphics engine. However, unhappy with its capabilities, the developers replaced it with their own engine they wrote from scratch. Even though the RenderWare logo is shown, there are almost no traces of the RenderWare engine left in the game (except for a few framework functions).

Information also contributed by Karthik KANE