Axios journalist Stephen Totilo succeeded in obtaining a video show the Play From Knights of DecadinNow, an Xbox exclusive has been canceled over twenty years ago. You can find it in the header of the news.
It is a little-known game, of which only still images have been seen so far. At first they were not called the Knights of the Decadin. In the developers’ first intentions, it was to be a PS2 exclusive, so much so that in 2000 they gave it to Sony. At that time they were called the Knights of Otto. With the move to Xbox, it was renamed Archipelago, then took the eventual name Knights of Decayden.
It was the development team that was making it Totally games, to which we owe Star Wars: X-Wing and its sequel. The team experience is also very visible in Knights of Decayden, which is also based on aerial combat between knights on what looks like a giant seahorse.
The project included a single player story mode and a multiplayer mode. Microsoft canceled it in 2002. Larry Holland, founder of Totally Games, remembers it as an ambitious project, which proved too much for the development studio. To make matters worse, the crisis was due to the acceptance of timing dictated by the Redmond House, and Microsoft itself, whose managers at the time knew very little about video games and were hard to please.
At the time of cancellation, the Decadin Knights were still very rude. The team expected this to happen, but it nonetheless dampened everyone’s morale a bit.
The most curious part of the story was that cutting Knights of Decayden was the first assignment given to Phil Spencer, the current head of Microsoft Gaming, when he started working at Xbox.
“Unable to type with boxing gloves on. Freelance organizer. Avid analyst. Friendly troublemaker. Bacon junkie.”
