Editors Note: The Game That Never Was is a new special segment that features video games that were ultimately cancelled for one reason or another. While some reasons are known, most are cancelled for unknown reasons. We will provide some background information about the game as well as post what might have led to the cancellation.
Dead Rush was being developed by Treyarch, the company most famous for the Call of Duty: Black Ops series and would’ve been published by Activision. Announced at E3 2004, Dead Rush would’ve taken place in a town called Eastport where a massive earthquake destroyed most of humanity.
The main character of the game was a man named Jake. Jake would be exploring the city to find out what happened to Eastport after the earthquake. He finds out it was taken over by Zombies while he was dealing with memory loss.
The game developed some hype amongst gamers after it was revealed that Jake would be able to operate several vehicles throughout Eastport that could be used as armored vehicles to cause chaos with. The zombies would try to destroy it, but you also would have the ability to create new vehicles by reusing parts of demolished cars.
The game was scheduled for release in 2005 for GameCube, Xbox, and Playstation 2, but that ultimately never happened. Shortly after being announced at E3 2004, the game was quietly cancelled and to this day nobody seems to have a real straightforward answer.
Luckily for us at Gaming Conviction, we do have an idea from an inside source. Last year we did an interview with Gideon Emery, the man who did the voice work for Jake. Emery said that he had only done one voice session and was never called back. He later said that the game was cancelled “as it wasn’t developing to the level or speed that they wanted.” Unfortunately, no prototype, demo, or beta is known to exist and will more than likely never surface.
