The original Xbox never got a South Park game, but if it had it would have looked something like this.
The raw work in progress was allegedly discovered on a debug original Xbox procured in August by Nintendo Age forum moderator qixmaster, who posted a few screenshots and a single cutscene from the game.
Sometime between then and now the folks at HappyConsoleGamer got hold of the console, and after a bit of exploring put together the following video. It features the South Park kids exploring a virtual city filled with worded placeholder textures, open road driving, and even a combat test section in which Eric Cartman beats up wild dogs.
So it’s basically South Park meets Simpsons Hit ‘N Run or Grand Theft Auto. I can’t find any indication that the game was ever a proper project, much less why it was canned. We were probably better off waiting for The Stick of Truth anyway.
The game was supposedly under development by Oregon’s Buzz Monkey Games, a studio funded by former members of Dynamix. The studio worked on licensed properties and co-developing and porting games in the Tomb Raider series. After a brief dip into mobile gaming the studio was purchased by Zynga in 2012, becoming Zynga Eugene.
Hats off to the folks at HappyConsoleGamer for digging into the original Xbox and pulling out this footage.
Comments
6 responses to “The First Gameplay Footage From An Unannounced South Park Xbox Game”
“So it’s basically South Park meets Simpsons Hit ‘N Run”
Yeah, no big loss.
Simpsons Hit ‘n’ Run was a really great game.
We did not need a South Park version of it.
Sorry, that’s exactly what I meant 🙂
Hit and run was fine at the time but it was still empty compared to GTA/Crazy taxi.
back in the days where everything had to be 3d… yuck
Reminds me of the N64 South Park game. Could be the nostalgia though.
These days they can run some pretty good shaders on 3d models to turn them back into more 2D looking cartoon characters. Might have made this a little better, but you would need to crank it up pretty high.