Origin Games That Weren't: Silverheart

In 1995, while he was finishing Wing Commander IV, Chris Roberts had another live-action video game in pre-production at Origin. Silverheart was to be a third person action-adventure game in a post-apocalyptic/medieval setting. It never materialized, but a tie-in novel outlined by English multiverse author Michael Moorcock was published in 2005. Now, director of photography Layton Blaylock is offering us a glimpse of what might have been with the test footage below. Thanks to Joe from the Origin Museum for the heads-up!

Roberts had also planned to work on a third person action-adventure title called Silverheart, set in a universe created by famed English fantasy author Michael Moorcock. “[Moorcock] was one of my favorite fantasy novelists. It serendipitously turned out that he’d moved to near Austin, so I’d contracted him to create this world and write a script for me. I actually had Silverheart in early pre-production while we were doing Wing Commander IV. Silverheart was going to be my project right after Wing Commander III.” Electronic Arts came knocking for a fourth Wing Commander game immediately after the third title in the series, however, which ended up pushing back Silverheart’s development.

Roberts negotiated to get the rights to Silverheart back from Electronic Arts while doing the deal for the Wing Commander movie, and planned to produce the fantasy game after Freelancer’s completion. “Of course I never got around to doing Silverheart, because I sold Digital Anvil to Microsoft and went off to do movies,” Roberts said.