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There has been no shortage of video games inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds over the years. From titles that adapted Jeff Wayne's musical adaptation of the book for the ZX Spectrum, Windows PCs, and PlayStation, to more original projects that simply took inspiration from the source material, such as Half Life 2, which featured Striders, large three-legged machines not a million miles removed from the Martian Tripods.
But what you might not know is that we almost got another game during the Xbox 360 era that paid homage to the classic 1898 science fiction novel in the form of a third-person, mech-based adventure game, titled Ironclad.
Earlier this week, a build of the cancelled project surfaced online on Hidden Palace, thanks to an individual named Aubrey, and came to our attention just this morning via a social media post from Prototopia (Formerly Obscure Gamers), who has also published a video taking a deeper look at the build.
As Prototopia states, Ironclad was in development at The Workshop Entertainment Inc., a California-based company founded by Peter Akemann, founder of Treyarch Invention (alongside former Treyarch employees Chris Busse and Charles Tolman).
This was a studio primarily known for developing the 2012 PlayStation Move-based game Sorcery for Sony, but that also provided behind-the-scenes support on games like The Evil Within and XCOM 2 before being acquired by Skydance Media in 2016 (becoming Skydance Interactive in the process).
The build is dated December 16th, 2008, suggesting it was one of the studio's first projects, and features a few different demos. The main "Ironclad demo" shows what could be the opening of the game, with the protagonist running away from a tripod and a bunch of insect-like aliens, with a crowd of people around him fleeing in terror. Interestingly, as Prototopia discovered, players can actually shoot these civilians, though it's unclear whether this was a feature of the game or simply something intended for the demo.
This particular demo ends with the player character discovering the Ironclad, with another demo available from the menu, labelled the Cul De Sac demo, letting you experience what it feels like piloting this mech around a set of quiet streets, using street lamps as weapons and breaking everything in sight with the game's promising destruction-based mechanics.
All in all, it looked pretty darn impressive, so it's sad to see this was never developed into a full game. But at the very least, players can now see what the team was working on, instead of the game simply being lost to time.