In 2004, a young developer studio called Swingin’ Ape Studio was looking to start a new project and proposed some to different publishers. Coming off the heals of the release of Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, the company proposed an idea of a game called Guerilla: Jungle Revolt for the upcoming Xbox 360 console.
The project didn’t start off with a jungle setting however. It actually started off as a post-apocalyptic coop shooter inspired by the movie Mad Max. When the company proposed the concept to Electronic Arts, the publisher that the game be a military shooter set on an island similar to Ubisoft’s Far Cry franchise.
So the company went back and started working on this idea, but instead of going back to Electronic Arts, they went to Microsoft themselves. Microsoft liked the idea and proposed that it be a launch title for the upcoming “Xbox 2” as it was still known back then. Since this was still before dev-kits for the Xbox 360 was sent to studios, Swingin’ Ape Studio started working on an early prototype on the original Xbox dev-kits. This prototype showed the basic gameplay mechanics and made it playable on four linked Xbox consoles for local multiplayer.
Microsoft still liked it and proposed 3 months of fuding to develop the game using the Xbox 360 hardware. However, an opportunity of a lifetime was proposed to them that would change the landscape of the project and the studio itself. Blizzard approached them about working on the StarCraft: Ghost project, which has just been pulled from Nihilistic Software, and offered them funding for a few years. The company gladly accepted the offer from Blizzard and was later acquired by Blizzard in May 2005.
Sadly, this resulted in not only Guerilla: Jungle Revolt being cancelled, but StarCraft: Ghost being cancelled some time in 2006. Many who worked on these projects are still around to this day under the Blizzard banner and have worked on projects related to the massively popular MMO World of Warcraft.
