SparkChronicles Trusted California News Portal
Journalist Stephen Totilo of Axios head managed to get a video showing the gameplay from Knights of Decayden, an Xbox exclusive now canceled more than twenty years ago. You can find it at the head of the news.
It is a little known game, of which so far only static images have been seen. Initially it wasn’t even called Knights of Decayden. In the first intentions of the developers it was to be a PS2 exclusive, so much so that in 2000 they presented it to Sony. At the time it was called Knights of Utu. With the transition to Xbox it was renamed Archipelago, then took the final name of Knights of Decayden.
The development team that was making it was Totally Games, to which we owe Star Wars: X-Wing and sequels. The team’s experience is also clearly visible in Knights of Decayden, which is also based on aerial combat between knights astride what look like giant seahorses.
The project included a single player story mode and a multiplayer mode. Microsoft canceled it in 2002. Larry Holland, the founder of Totally Games, remembers it as an ambitious project, which proved too much for the development studio. To make matters worse were the crunch, due to having accepted the timing dictated by the Redmond house, and Microsoft itself, whose managers at the time knew very little about video games and were difficult to please.
At the time of the cancellation, Knights of Decayden was still very crude. The team expected it to happen, but nonetheless it demoralized everyone a bit.
The most curious part of the story was that the Knights of Decayden cut was the first assignment given to Phil Spencer, the current head of Microsoft Gaming, when he started working for Xbox.
