Overview

A couple of weeks ago, tens of thousands of game publishers, developers, retailers, media, booth babes and a guy who wore a robot head converged on the Los Angeles Convention Center for the 2006 edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. You may have heard of this event. One might assume that a ton of great games were shown at the expo and you would be right. However, not all of the upcoming games in the next 12 to 18 months were shown on the show floor or even behind closed doors. What previously announced titles didn’t make it to E3 2006? Today we check out just a sampling of games that had been announced before E3 2006 (sometimes as much as years before) but for one reason or another were not shown at the expo

Upcoming Steam-Source Engine games

The Half-Life and Half-Life 2 creators at Valve started something interesting with both their Source engine and their Steam content delivery service. It gave third party developers both an impressive graphics engine and a way to bypass the normal publishing route via the Internet. While SiN Episodes was shown at E3 the week it was released via Steam, several other announced Source-Steam titles were not shown, including the biggest one of all.

Half-Life 2: Episode 1: Valve’s first foray into the episodic game genre is due out via Steam on June 1,just a week away from now. However, Valve elected not to show the first chapter anywhere at E3, presumably for Valve to continue to work on the game at their offices before its debut. There’s no doubt that this first chapter will not only be hugely popular but a way to gauge how people feel about short episodic games.

Unnamed Turtle Rock Studios Game: The development team has work with Valve primarily on their Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source multiplayer games, developing AI for bots, creating new levels and other new content for these hugely popular games. However, Turtle Rock and Valve recently announced that Turtle Rock would be working on their own original game for the Source engine and delivered via Steam for release sometime this year. What could it be? It was a no show at E3 so we will have to wait a little while longer to find out.


They Hunger: Lost Souls: In January, Black Widow Games announced plans to release a Source engine based horror action game that was based on the well known Half-Life 1 single player total conversion mods. There has been little to no info on the game since the announcement and it was also a no show at E3. Hopefully we will get some news about the zombie filled game very soon.

Untitled Junction Point Studios Game: Famed game designer Warren Spector formed Junction Point Studios in late 2004 after leaving Ion Storm where games like Thief III and the Deus Ex titles were created. Spector has remained silent on what Junction Point is working on but we do know via job postings on the company’s web site that it is a Source engine based game that will use Valve’s Steam service. Again, it was a no show at E3 so we still have to guess about what Spector and his new team are creating.