Throughout the '90s, the Manchester studio Software Creations was involved in a ton of projects that never saw the light of day, with the company struggling to adapt to the 32-bit era after having a moderate amount of success on the NES and the SNES with games like Solstice, Plok, Equinox, and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.
Some of the unreleased titles it was working on during this period included Spiral Saga (a spiritual successor to Equinox), N64 projects like Moon Jelly and Blade & Barrel, and a first-person on-rails shooter tie-in to the 1995 box office flop Waterworld for the 3DO and PS1. And it's this last project, which has recently found itself as the subject of a new video, which includes new interviews with the dev team (as well as info taken from the book Games That Weren't)
The video from the Waterworld fan channel The Atoll starts off by detailing some of the early concerns that the developers had about the project, claiming that some members of the team such as designer Ste Pickford wanted to turn it into something more akin to Wave Race 64 (before Wave Race 64 was necessarily even a thing).
As the video states, this was so that the team could take better advantage of the film's ocean environment. However, its publisher Interplay simply ignored this request and continued to demand it to be an on-rails shooter instead.
There are plenty of old magazine articles, screenshots, and concept art shown throughout the video, as well as insight given into why the game's development proved to be so difficult.
The video, in particular, cites the untested hardware and the film's constant rewrites as the main stumbling blocks the team faced, as well as the unrealistic expectations of an outside consultant brought in by Interplay in order to close the project who wanted to transform the game into a true realtime 3D experience as opposed to it being a pre-rendered title with 2D sprites.
Ultimately, both versions of the game were cancelled after many months of hard work, with Interplay pulling the plug after the film had been already released, due to missing its optimal launch window.
You can watch the full video above for more details.