Fans of the greatest game console of all time will surely be pleased to find the Sega Dreamcast Info website, maintained by Comby Laurent and packed with information about unreleased games, prototypes, press kits, demos and other platform esoterica.
«A MASSIVE, PUBLIC AND FREE SHARING OF WHAT I HAVE» Over the past 12 years, I have been able to acquire numerous pieces, some of which are unique in the world. People who have worked in the industry have also given me information that is often unpublished. I had to share this information with as many people as possible. The site was born from this desire to share. It has become a mini virtual museum.
The latest article is about Quark, an unreleased action-adventure game from Quantic that would have been the tonal opposite of 1998's Omikron: The Nomad Soul. The character and concept art (below, Thierry Doizon) is lovely and very turn-of-the-millennium, all part of a fully-imagined secret world to explore.
It all begins for the player (likely as an introductory cutscene) with the discovery of a secret society known as the "Travelers" who have the ability to travel through other universes. Quark is one of these parallel universes. Only the Travelers have the power to teleport in this way, and they have had it for a very long time. This group used to travel and interact in different worlds in order to bring wisdom and prosperity to each one.
The money ran out just as development costs blew up with the new consoles.
So how did this title manage to disappear into the limbo of abandoned projects? The explanation is financial, and indeed, the video game market was hit at the beginning of the millennium by a crisis due to the sharp increase in development costs (we are talking about the professionalization of the sector linked to a technological leap), the dot-com bubble crisis (which would spell the end for Cryo, but above all would discourage investors), and the type of game offered by Quark, a genre that was proliferating at the time (adventure games were in crisis). Another reason affected the sector: sales of PC and console games were falling (poor sales of the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2, which was mainly used as a DVD player with a fleet of machines that was not yet sufficiently installed).
A look back at the origins and genesis of Quark Dreamcast [SDI]
