The game that Phil Spencer closed first is found

In the 90s of the last century, the studio Totally Games made a name for itself by releasing games about flights. Its most famous work was the series of space shooters Star Wars: X-Wing. Perhaps this title would have been taken by another project if it had not been canceled by Microsoft.

The Axios portal was able to to get information (and even video) about an exclusive of the first Xbox that never happened. We are talking about Knights of Decayden (also referred to as Knights of Decadyn and Project Archipelago) - a game in which Totally games had to combine flights and a fantasy setting. What was the project:

• Users controlled a knight on a flying seahorse. He can move between islands that look like skyscrapers and fly over the sea.
• Gameplay combined ranged combat and slowmo combat with monsters and other knights on the surface. Under the water, the heroes fought against sea creatures.
• The game included both single player and multiplayer.

Initially, Knights of Decayden was offered by Sony to be released on the PlayStation 2. But later, the Totally Games project was sheltered by Microsoft. According to the plan, the game was to be released only on Xbox within a year of the start of sales of the console in 2001.

Founder of Totally Games Larry Holland mentions that Knights of Decayden was "an incredibly ambitious and equally stupid project". Creating a new world based on a unique combat system was not easy. But this is not the most unpleasant thing - the manager agreed to a tight deadline in order not to fire employees and not increase the budget.

The developers were forced to work in difficult conditions to "oil" the executives from Microsoft. But they had little experience in the gaming field and did not trust the developers - as he says Holland, one of the managers used to develop Excel.

Despite the team's suffering, the action was closed in early 2022. The founder of Totally Games admits that Knights of Decayden really looked raw at the time: "We haven't ironed out all the problems with scale, speed, and melee."

None other than himself was responsible for the cancellation of Knights of Decayden Phil Spencer. Then he just moved to the gaming division of Microsoft. His first task as the chief manager of one of the regions was to close the project from Totally Games. He had never done anything like that before.