List of vaporware

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Wired magazine has an annual "Vaporware Award" with a list of software it considers vaporware. ^[1] This page is an incomplete list of known examples of vaporware, in alphabetical order by product name:

[edit] List of vaporware

• Action Gamemaster - a handheld device designed by Active Enterprises [2]
• Black Mesa: Source - A highly anticipated mod for Half-Life 2 that depicts the events of the original game using the source engine to recreate the maps and model to a much higher detail than Half-Life: Source. It has been in production since 2004 and due to the largely voluntary nature of its programmers looks far from ever being completed.
• CSS Level 3 - Level 1 was released in 1996, Level 2 in 1998. Level 3 have been delayed several times and is still not released.
• Dawn - Roleplaying game touted to be the best to ever exist. Website consisted of generic-looking GIFs and videos of water effects.^[2]
• The Nintendo Entertainment System port of Deja Vu II, which was completed but never released, though a Game Boy Color port was released.
• Duke Nukem Forever, a five-time winner of Wired's Vaporware Award and Lifetime Vaporware Achievement.
• Elite 4 - a video game produced by Frontier Developments specifically by David Braben.
• Fresco - a replacement for the X Window System, formerly known as the Berlin Project.
• Glaze3D - a graphics card designed by BitBoys Oy.
• L600 - a Linux-based game console/computer produced by Indrema
• Mario 128 - a video game in development by Nintendo, which apparently evolved into Pikmin. The project later evolved into Super Mario Galaxy.
• Max Payne3 - A PC game.
• Metroid Dread - A Nintendo DS Game and speculated successor to Metroid Fusion, which was first "unveiled" by Game Informer in their list of First Party Nintendo Games to be seen at E3'05. Every single game and announcement on the list was seen in some form or shown to be true by Nintendo in the following days of E3'05, except for Metroid Dread, which was never, and still has yet to be spoken of by Nintendo. Most believed the game was canceled, granted it was ever in development at all, and only speculation of its existence is the only evidence for it to not have been.
• Ovation - An integrated software package for DOS that was announced by Ovation Technologies in 1983. Written about in many computer magazines at the time, Ovation was never released. ^[3]
• Phantom - a console gaming system developed by Infinium Labs ^[1]
• Project Xanadu - a hypertext content delivery system, postulated prior to the advent of the World Wide Web [3]
• Psyclapse - a hyped 8-bit "mega-game" which never made off paper.
• Rainbow Technology Supposedly allows you to store up to 450GB on a single A4 size paper.
• Secure Digital Music Initiative [4]
• SNES Nintendo Disk a.k.a. Philips CD-ROM XA-a system developed in 1992 to compete with the Playstation prototype, which was designed in 1991. ^[4]
• StarCraft: Ghost - a first person shooter based on the StarCraft world by Blizzard - is now "postponed indefinitely" after 5 years of development ^[5]
• Vantive's Lawsuit in the late 90s ^[6]
• Dead Frontier - a MMORPG focused largly around Zombies has been delayed severely with major mishaps and is likely to never be released completely [edit: It was released in April 08...]

[edit] Surfaced vaporware

Products which once were considered to be Vaporware which eventually surfaced after a prolonged time:

• 3G [5]
• Arc - A dialect of Lisp being developed by Paul Graham.
• Bluetooth ^[7]
• Daikatana ^[1]
• Diablo II ^[8]
• Internet Explorer 7 ^[1]
• Joomla 1.5 - The CMS had been announced in 2001 and was released in spring 2008.
• Microsoft Windows Vista (then, "Windows Longhorn")^[1]
• Return to Dark Castle - a game for the Apple Macintosh "under development" since 1996, released in 2008 after several changes in ownership.
• Windows 2000 ^{[9] [10]}
• Warcraft III ^{[11] [7]}
• Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms ^[1] was announced in 1999, and took 8 years to be released.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess ^[1]
• Prey - originally announced in 1995, the project was halted in 1998. After Human Head Studios began working on the project in 2001, with its ultimate release on June 22, 2006.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl - originally announced in 2001, the game experienced numerous delays. Beta builds of the final product have been distributed to numerous game review sites ^[12]. On March 3, 2007, THQ announced that the game had gone gold and was released on March 20, 2007, though it was leaked three days earlier.
• Stonekeep began development in late-1990 with a projected development of nine months. The development continued to drag on until it was release in November 1995. Stonekeep was ranked in the top ten vaporware titles by GameSpot prior to the game's release. After the game's release, it was awarded Editor's Choice Award for Best RPG of 1996 (PC Entertainment), Best RPG of 1995 (Computer Player), and Reader's Choice Role Playing Game Of the Year 1996 (Computer Gaming World).

[edit] References