Lionhead and Minter cancel Unity project

Britsoft legend Jeff Minter and development studio Lionhead have announced that their GameCube collaboration, Unity, has been cancelled after it became apparent that it would not be commercially viable.

The game was an abstract shoot 'em up based on Minter's unique LightSynth technology, which was designed to allow lightshows to be played in the same way as a musical instrument - although seemingly inevitable comparisons with Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez were overshadowed by Minter's own previous titles, which include GridRunner and the Tempest series.

However, Unity, the project which looked set to bring together Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, one of Britain's most successful developers, Jeff Minter, one of its most innovative and creative, has now been officially dropped.

"Unity was always an ambitious and experimental project and as is the case with such endeavours they do not always come to fruition," Minter and Lionhead commented in an official statement on the cancellation.

"Both Lionhead and Jeff are disappointed that it has been necessary to take this step despite significant publisher interest. However, a shared commitment to excellence and originality meant both sides agree that the cancellation of the project was in everyone's best interests."

Minter went into more detail about the reasoning for the cancellation on his own website, where he revealed that the decision came down to a question of either rushing the project or ending up with a title so late in the GameCube's life span that nobody would wish to publish it.

"Basically, although I've built a shedload of stuff for Unity in the past couple of years it's become clear that getting it all together into something that I'd be happy to call Unity and put my name to was going to take a lot of time and effort both from myself and the guys at Lionhead," he explained, "and realistically it was becoming unlikely that it'd be finished in time for anyone to want to publish it on GameCube. The alternative would be a rush job and we simply didn't want to do that. Best to call it a day."