Okay, now that I cleared that up: today I've been rereading the Prey development documents, written circa 1998 (gotta upload them to the Duke Museum sooner or later) and I came across an internal schedule in a document last saved on October 29, 2007. Apparently, 3DRealms expected to release the shareware episode of Prey in May/June 1998, and the complete version in September/IOctober the same year. Of course, this schedule was fine and dandy in 1997, when 3DRealms was supposed to use the Quake2 engine for DNF to have it done by mid-1998 at the latest, while preparing the stage for the main course, the true killer app, the touted revolution: Prey.
When mid-1998 came around, and 3DRealms was supposed to release the shareware episode of Prey according to the original schedule, disaster struck. George decided to trash everything that was done for DNF and restart development from scratch, with the Unreal engine. I'm wondering how deeply the planned Prey schedule was affected, because I can infer two effects.
1) With no salvageable content, a short-term release had become impossible. The original schedule (DNF as a stopgap, Prey as the main and most advanced attraction) could just not be followed anymore.
2) The prospect of an Unreal-based DNF had just killed Prey's entire reason to exist. Prey was meant to be revolutionary, to be somethng never seen before... except that the other first-party team was expected to turn DNF into something better. Compare this with this and tell me which one looks more impressive.
Given these premises, it makes sense that work on Paul Schuytema's iteration of Prey was stopped around September/October 1998, the scheduled release date. Even inverting the roles of the two games (Prey as the stopgap, DNF as the revolution) would have made no sense, because the presence of Unreal (with warpzones as static portals, and the ability to assign a different value and direction of gravity to each zone) would have made Prey look like a ripoff!
Attached File(s)
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new whole design 5.doc (2.59MB)
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