Canceled Daredevil Game Sees The Light Of Day After 20 Years
Daredevil Man Without Fear prototype gameplay
We’ve seen some pretty great superhero games in the last decade or so, from Rocksteady’s Arkham series to the utterly fantastic Spider-Man games from Insomniac. These games, while the most recent superhero games, aren’t the only ones — developers have been making licensed superhero games for as long as games have been around. And now, after 20 years, we’re finally getting a look at a Daredevil game that never saw the light of day.
Hidden Palace, a community wiki dedicated to cataloging and preserving video games, has published a lengthy blog post detailing an unearthed Daredevil game that was supposed to be released in 2004, but was canceled at the last second. The game is called Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, and it was originally planned to be released on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC almost two decades ago.
A 2004 prototype of the game, which is said to be almost complete but still quite buggy, was donated to Hidden Palace by an anonymous developer who worked on the game, and Hidden Palace’s post goes into great depth describing how it came to be and, importantly, why it was canceled.
According to the blog post, Encore Inc had purchased licenses to create multiple Marvel games, including games based on Captain America and Daredevil. The Daredevil game was handed off to developer 5,000 Ft., which tried its best to create something vaguely reminiscent of the 2003 Daredevil film starring Ben Affleck in the eponymous leading role.
As the story goes, however, Sony was very hands-on with the game, asking for the developer to add a beat-em-up style combat system, a Tony Hawk-inspired grinding mechanic, and more. Ultimately, Marvel wasn’t a big fan of this bold new direction, and refused to approve the game, thus sunsetting it forever.
Hidden Palace says that the game is mostly playable, although is prone to crashing and is filled with bugs — not uncommon for a game that is near to release but not quite done yet. Hidden Palace has also uploaded about 20 minutes of game footage to YouTube, which you can see above.
Related: Marvel’s New Daredevil Series Reportedly Rebooted After Head Writers Canned
It looks pretty decent for 2004, honestly, and has some interesting mechanics like a “heat signature vision” that would become popular in subsequent games like Assassin’s Creed and Hitman in the following years. Unfortunately, it’s not really known if the game will be fixed in the future, and even if it were, it probably wouldn’t be strictly legal to play it.
Still, given the upcoming Wolverine game might feature Insomniac’s Spider-Man, who’s to say Daredevil couldn’t make an appearance too? Or maybe even get his own game set within the Insomniac universe. Anything is possible in comics.
