Malice

Cut content

In one of the trailers for Malice, it was shown that the player could control a cat. However, this never occurs in the actual game.

Developer retrospective

A few words about the development of Malice by (Lead) Designer Dave Gumble:

Work on this title lasted from 1997 to 2003.

Malice was originally slated for PS1 release. But Argonaut wanted to take the heart of this game and push it onto the new Xbox platform So they poured a lot of resources into it, creating the Shadowcaster engine and re-working the original PS1 levels into an Xbox frame. Microsoft were initially impressed... but soon felt that the proposed schedule was 'too cerebral' ie: unworkable and they walked away.

However Vivendi picked it up - and believed Gwen Stefani as a voice talent would be a great pull And yet, a year on and they too pulled out.

At this point, the original Malice team was pared down to a handful of people - excluding the original director Herman Serrano - whose job it was to salvage whatever was left and create something simple and sellable.

The end result was an incoherent game and released by small vendors to a lukewarm reception.

Development

Malice was originally going to have music by popular punk band No Doubt with the characters voiced by the band members. Gwen Stefani was going to play Malice herself. Vocal work was recorded, but ultimately not used. Other elements were dropped as well, such as the morphing clockwork hammer and several enemies that appeared in pre-release screenshots.

Publisher change

The game was originally to be published by Vivendi under the Sierra label, but when the flow of news about the game stopped in 2002, it reappeared in 2004 when it was announced Mud Duck Productions (US) and Evolved Games (Europe) would publish it after all.

Additional information contributed by Ace of Sevens Dave Gumble and firespot.