Why does it seem sometimes that games that should have been axed, ended up being released, while promising projects, end up getting thrown in the can? That might have been the case with the now-deceased FASA Studios.

There last project, Shadowrun, a multiplayer FPS set in the long-running cyberpunk-fantasy IP, did not do as well as the company hoped -- or Microsoft, who bought out FASA in 1999. The commercial failure of the game meant the death of the dev studio. But as it turns out, the FPS that came to be Shadowrun was started after an earlier aborted attempt at a single-player possibly-RPG Shadowrun game, called Shadowrun: The Awakening (for the PC and Xbox 360).

Some screenshots and early video of Shadowrun: The Awakening popped up today, on the Net-Inters. The graphics look pretty good, considering this 2007, and the game was in an early state. 

Shadowrun: The Awakening was supposed to be a full single player game, and we can hypothesize that the entire Shadowrun game that was published might have just been the MP component of the more ambitious earlier project. Hearing about this late cancellation and complete change of plan for the game makes a lot of sense -- many people who played Shadowrun commented on how little content it seemed to have for a full game, as it was only MP, only a handful of maps, and not too many models (many reviewers knocked the game for not even having character ladder-climbing animations).

Furthermore, with Shadowrun's strong RPG legacy, in both early video games and of course the pen-and-paper source material, many fans were disgruntled to hear that the last Shadowrun game wasn't going to be a RPG at all. We would like to think that if Shadowrun: The Awakening was a single-player RPG it would have resonated much more with gamers than did the last (and maybe final) game.

If you are a fan of the Shadowrun world you will be happy to hear that there is a chance that a new Shadowrun game will be made some day though. FASA founder Weisman recently re-licensed his bought-out rights (that Microsoft now owns) to the Shadowrun I.P. Perhaps if Weisman's Smith & Tinker venture is a success, which is now finishing up a Mechwarrior game, maybe there will be a chance for something like Shadowrun: The Awakening to be made again.