Starcraft: Ghost, Blizzard’s canceled third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe, has resurfaced in the form of a leaked playable build for the Xbox.
Blizzard announced StarCraft: Ghost for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube at the Tokyo Games Show in 2002, but the project was suspended in 2006. Eight years later in 2014, Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime confirmed that the stealth action game was canceled, breaking the hearts of StarCraft fans who were hoping that the shooter would see the light of day.
The leaked playable build for Starcraft: Ghost, which would have featured a Terran Ghost named Nova, made the rounds in social media after Andrew Borman, the digital games curator at The Strong in New York, shared screenshot of the game on Twitter.
Note that this is not from me, has nothing to do with my work, and was posted anonymously throughout various Xbox groups. Just reporting the news.
— Andrew Borman (@Borman18) February 16, 2020
Borman clarified that he was not the source of the leak, but the screenshots apparently came from “various Xbox groups.” Twitter account DaysAfterRodeo reportedly confirmed to Kotaku that the playable build of StarCraft: Ghost was from an Xbox dev kit that contains the game.
A YouTube user who goes by the name Leerz Meneses then uploaded a 13-minute video of StarCraft: Ghost that was running on a modified Xbox 360. The video apparently showed some basic gameplay that resembled most of the shooters in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, that video has since been removed by the uploader.
The leaked playable build of StarCraft: Ghost, however, may still be viewed through videos by YouTube accounts RetroGamerBB2019 and Delso Bezerra.
Videos of StarCraft: Ghost have been leaked before, but the second video with 720p resolution is arguably the best look ever into what the game could have been if Blizzard continued with the project.
Blizzard was reportedly working in another StarCraft shooter after the canceled StarCraft: Ghost, but history repeated itself, according to a report by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier in June last year. Sources claimed that a first-person StarCraft shooter was in development for two years, but Blizzard shut down the project in order to allocate more resources to Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. The game was codenamed Ares, and prototypes allowed players to take on the role of either Terran marines or as part of the Zerg swarm.
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