Not all game concepts make it to market, and Oscuro: The Mystery of Hab-12 is a documentary centered on a particularly mysterious title. Massimiliano Camassa, known on YouTube as Cheeken, showcases the ill-fated 3rd person space adventure Hab-12 with help from some of the original developers.
Ratloop Games started development for Hab-12 in February of 1998, but the project was officially suspended around July of 1999. Over 20 years later, it is the subject of a film which will dig into the circumstances leading to the creation of Hab-12, the process of game development, and the circumstances which led to the title's eventual scrapping. Cheeken will release the documentary to YouTube on September 15th, but a version is available for early viewing on Gumroad.
Hab-12 is a very mysterious title with almost nothing known publicly except that it was in development. Ratloop Games' website features only a short blurb on the title, along with screenshots and rendered elements from the game and two MP3 tracks. Ratloop Games is not doing anything with the title right now, but development "may be resumed in the future."
The trailer for this video game documentary shows never-before-seen gameplay from demos provided by Ratloop Games. The unfinished game had scenery ranging from technologically advanced cities to orange-misted forests on some strange world. Carnivorous aliens, strange landscapes, and late-20th-century graphics gives it a look similar to the first Half-Life game released by Valve around the same time.
Running a 20-year-old game on a modern system is no easy feat, and Ratloop Games praised the YouTuber for his ingenuity. Since the code was never made to run on modern graphics cards, Cheeken must have had to employ some sort of emulator. Running recording software on top of that makes the technical challenge much greater.
Oscuro: The Mystery of Hab-12 will be available on YouTube on September 15th.