More than a decade ago now, The Coalition was known as 'Black Tusk Studios'; developing an original IP for Microsoft and Xbox. Some of you may remember the game's teaser trailer from E3 2013 that depicted a spy thriller of some sort, but the game never came to be. Well, a new report from DidYouKnowGaming goes into the title's history a little bit, alongside detailing Microsoft's decision to switch to making Gears of War 4 instead.
The report, which we've thrown up above, is quite an in-depth look at the project and its developer. The 48-minute video even goes into the very origins of The Coalition that may surprise some people - including the fact that the studio was once making several casual Kinect games for the Xbox owner before moving onto AAA game development. It's a super interesting look at what is now one of the team's biggest studios, and is well worth a watch.
Of course, there are some particularly interesting bits of the report that will likely grab headlines - including one quote from a former worker that claimed Xbox intended for this spy thriller project to rival PlayStation's Uncharted series before being canned. Here's one such quote:
"It was definitely meant to be a real game, it was described to me as Microsoft's version of Uncharted. But the game was never on sure footing. I've worked on a lot of games and after a while, you can tell straight away when a project is going to be canned.
I knew as soon as I started working on it that if it was ever going to ship it would have taken at least five more years. The guys in charge of it didn't really have a vision for the experience the game was and they were just stumbling around hoping they could come up with something that felt right."
Of course, in the end, they never did land on that vision - and once Microsoft acquired the Gears of War IP in early 2014, the wheels were in motion for the studio to take the reigns on that series instead. We've had several big Gears games since — with E-Day to come next year of course — but it's a shame that this Black Tusk project never saw the light of day. Even so, this is a fascinating look at it - and how one of Xbox's biggest studios came to be.