Dog Eat Dog (lost builds of cancelled PC adventure/simulation game; 1992-1995)

Screenshot from the early version.

Status: Lost

Dog Eat Dog is a cancelled PC adventure game, originally developed in 1992 by Darlene Waddington (who also worked on Dragon's Lair on arcade and Duck Tales on NES) for Buena Vista Software, a division of Disney Software that concentrated on games for an older, more mature audience.^[1]

Premise

The game would have the player (either male or female) as an office employee attempting to work their way up in the "Big Black Box Industries" company by interacting towards many other characters, getting various results by changing their communicating attitude (going from "Berate", "Sympathize", or "Kissup").

The storyline would have been quite dark and cynical, encouraging the player to be manipulative and opportunistic, and satirizing the merciless nature of the corporate world (hence the title). It would also have included sexual themes. The graphics were comic-book inspired (by this period).

Development

The project was left in development hell, until it was reprised in 1995, this time produced by Trilobyte. Waddington was still designing the game, along with two other writers, Tamara Williams and Susan Chaw, forming the Ministry Of Thought studio.

The look of the game was completely revamped; it was redesigned as to be FMV (which was a trend in PC games of the mid 1990s), with more than twenty actors. They were to be shot on green-screen and afterwards incrusted on 3D backgrounds. Despite shooting almost 200 hours of film and spending almost a million dollars on it, the game ended up being cancelled for good.

No known playable copy of either version of the game has been made available. And both versions are considered "Lost".