Vectorman (found builds of unfinished PlayStation 2 platformer; early 2000s)

E3 booth art.

Status: Partially Lost/Found

Development history

According to a Retro Gamer and Ign interview, Pseudo Interactive pitched demos to Sega for a new Vectorman game, with one of them being similar to Smash TV. This demo involved Vectorman running through time with the music being techno and had shooting gameplay. Sega were impressed enough by these demos that they greenlit a prototype. At the start, the project was more in line with the past two games, with one of the things kept in tact being Vectorman's orb design. This more faithful approach lasted 3 to 4 months until Sega switched producers, thus leading to a focus test of the prototype that didn't go well. The younger audience during the test were confused by Vectorman's orb design and were not familiar with the series. This caused Sega's producers to ask for changes around the new year of 2002. A producer suggested taking inspiration from Socom and Halo due to their popularity at the time. After 8 months, Sega canceled the project in August 2003. The reasoning for cancellation seems to have multiple different answers with none being absolute. These answers range from Sega realizing they changed the series too much, Sega of America were about to have layoffs and seemed disinterested in their retro ip after Toejam and Earl 3 underperformed to the game still being in kind of rough shape at the end of development and it was easier to cancel it than to finish it for release according to a youtuber named Snack Cabinet Gaming who claimed to have talked to the developers on the game and had info that matched with the info revealed in the Retro Gamer interview.^[1] ^[2]

Gameplay details / Story

The game's story would be about Vectorman losing a previous battle and being rebuilt. The game would involve you to try and save gamma 6 from an Orbot named Volt. It would have you begin in a environment similar to Ord Mantell that would have Vectorman traveling through a crashed ship that was ascending. The gameplay would have destructible environments and multiple weapons and upgrades to choose from. Vectorman would also have a grappling hook for traversal. ^[1] ^[3]

Lost prototypes availability

Currently, the prototype shown at E3 2003 has not surfaced online as of yet along with the earlier prototype shown during the focus test and the Smash Tv like build along with the other demos pitched to Sega. The only possibility of where the prototypes could be is from Sega due to their Sega Forever twitter account revealing a high quality image of the e3 booth art possibly suggesting they may still have more info on the game. Hopefully someday these prototypes appear online.^[4]

Videos ^[5] ^[6]