I can't find anything online, but I remember a team from Sega headed over to America (I think it was somewhere in in Illinois) to work on an "ambitious" arcade game. It might've involved ghosts or aliens. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Did it turn into anything or was it quickly canceled and forgotten? Thanks for your help.
Sounds like it. I definitely remembered the suburban Illinois detail just because it sounded so outlandish at the time. I don't remember details about it taking place in mall or talk of any weapons when I read the original announcement. At the time, I thought it was going to be some kind of light gun game. The game kind of sounds like Dead Rising with aliens. I wonder if there is a connection.
They had Psy Phi which fits the time frame but I'm sure you'd know if that was what you were thinking of.
I'm fairly sure "Carbondale" wasn't Psy-Phi, as none of the articles I remember reading about this project mentioned the involvement of Yu Suzuki. On the other hand, I do recall it once being suggested that after being cancelled, elements from this game - possibly its engine technology and portions of field location studies - may have been recycled for Condemned or even some titles in development at Obsidian. I wish someone was able to find the other reports that I'd seen regarding Carbondale back in the day, since I could have sworn the Alien RPG team made use of this research, though I'm certainly not saying this came out of that preliminary work. Considering how expensive it must have been to fly a Japanese group out to Illinois, my guess is that it would be in Sega's best interest to make something from its initial and large financial investment, even if the end result wasn't the high profile arcade release as originally planned.
I remember this article as I lived in St. Louis at the time. Shinichi Ogasawara is Sega's arcade rail gun shooting guru, not sure what he would do on console, Pretty certain, he did the recent Sega Transformers arcade. Psy-Phi is a totally different game which I've played on test in Shinjuku and at the Chicago Game Works. It is a touch screen fighter.
I guess this project disappeared without a trace. That's a shame. With all that research, Sega should've begun some sort of development cycle--even if we're just looking at concept art. I wonder if anyone out there knows more than what these old articles say. I remember being pretty excited for the project at the time. It sounded so mysterious.
But condemned was made by Monolith, and the only Obsidian game that I recall to be published by sega is Alpha Protocol.
