Polish video game designer (and People Can Fly co-founder) Adrian Chmielarz has a long history in the gaming world, but not everything he cooked up made it onto the market. One such game is Come Midnight, a pulp noir detective thriller that was originally planned for the Xbox 360 generation of gaming.
Details on this canceled game project started being revealed last week following a poll Chmielarz ran on his Twitter, with 66.5% of respondents wanting to hear the whole saga of this game.
"I'm ready to spill the beans on a cancelled dream project we worked on after Painkiller, a pulpy action-adventure horror," Chmielarz said in a tweet. "I have tons of materials, and I can either select some and do one fat post, or post most/all of it in 2-3 weekly installments."
Check out a portion of the Come Midnight internal demo to see some gameplay of this never-released title:
If it isn't obvious, it should be noted that this was internal gameplay from a development studio. It's lacking a lot of the polish you'd expect to see for a public release, but it certainly gets the point across.
Adrian Chmielarz and his team spent around a year putting this game together, so much so that they brought People Can Fly to the brink of failure. A ton of trailers, demos, and concept art piled up as they ramped up development for the game, and this wonderful world ultimately led to them getting picked up by THQ.
This is the part of the story where we should be saying that Come Midnight launched on the Xbox 360 as a massive success and we're very much looking forward to the next game in the franchise. Unfortunately, Come Midnight never saw the light of day.
Why was Come Midnight Canceled?
From what I've seen of this game thus far, this pulp noir title showed a lot of promise. So why the heck was it canceled? As far as Adrian Chmielarz knows, he has no idea, but he can make a very good guess.
"Rumour was that THQ was getting out of the development in Europe and they were killing European projects left and right," he explained in this week's blog post on the canceled project. "Supposedly, it was between us and [S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.] They chose the latter, and, to be fair, that was probably the right choice."
If, perhaps, you are hoping to see this game somehow get released today, you shouldn't likely hold out hope. According to Adrian Chmielarz, the rights to the game rested with THQ and have moved on to whatever company has snapped up that portion of their portfolio. That said, he'd still love to return to the subject matter at hand.
"I still want to go back to pulp noir in the future, though, but that’s a whole different story for another time."
For now, you can check out the first part and second part of the Come Midnight saga and reflect on what could have been a great game.
Would you have wanted to play Adrian Chmielarz's Come Midnight? Do you think there is still a market for pulp noir games today? Let us know in the comments below!
