Eight Days Looked 'Jaw Dropping' Pre-Cancellation, According To Ex-Studio London Developers.

The game — which depicted a sensational desert shoot-out in its opening trailer — was cancelled in 2008. But developers that worked on the game have told Eurogamer that what was in development was "jaw dropping".

The news comes via ex-Studio London employee Richard Bunn. Now working for mobile phone studio Nice Touch Games, he told Eurogamer that the title would have "definitely impressed" if the game got released, but management changes within SCE and soaring development costs meant the title eventually got cancelled alongside The Getaway 3.

One thing that wasn't to blame, according to Bunn, was the game's supposed lack of multiplayer.

"It was going to have online co-op," Bunn revealed. "The entire concept behind the game was based around buddy gameplay. Imagine Uncharted, where you have two Nathan Drakes, and you can cover swap between each other and chuck ammo between each other. That was pretty much the game.

"We fully intended to have online co-op support. No multiplayer, but online co-op. We definitely didn't have any plans to do multiplayer modes.

"The game was looking spectacular," Bunn continued. "A lot of what was shown off publicly had a bit of a mixed review. But what was going on in-house at the time was looking quite spectacular.

"I designed a new opening level for them. My goal there was to make the opening level every bit as good as something you would see in God of War. We had that fully playable in prototype form and it was jaw dropping. It was exceedingly good. All of the other level designers on the team were doing great work.

"It's just what had been shown publicly was a bit hit and miss. And then the amount of work that needed to go into finishing the game was phenomenal. But it had some great features in there," he said.

"It had directed moments, which were big cinematic scenes similar to God of War. It had driving sections. It had duck and cover style gameplay. It was pretty spectacular. Some of the stuff that was never shown publicly would definitely have impressed if it had ever made it out into the public."

At the time Sony stated that it was cancelling the game to focus resources on other upcoming first-party exclusives, but Bunn believes that was only part of the truth.

"It had been in pre-production for a long time and had soaked up a lot of money," Bunn said. "You have to think back as well, this was when the PS3 was in its infancy and was considered overpriced and it wasn't doing as well as Sony had hoped.

"Eight Days had already cost a fair amount of money. They'd done their maths and said, 'it's going to cost this much to finish the project,' which I'd rather not disclose. It was quite a bit. It was about another year's worth of development, so you can probably work out roughly for a big game how much that might have come to. And then they basically said, projecting forward what the PS3 user base is going to be a year from now, you're going to have to be way above the trend on user tie-in to make a profit.

"At the time tie-in for a very good game was about ten per cent of the user base. They said we needed to be two or three times above that to be able to make a profit. It's not the sort of thing that ever happens.

"And plus, Uncharted had just come out. So, they already had a third-person action game in the stable. At that point they decided they were going to re-purpose the Sony Soho studio as being an EyeToy, motion gaming studio and move away from doing games like The Getaway and Eight Days, at that location.

"It was a crying shame for a lot of people. There were a lot of people who had worked on it a lot longer than I had. So it wasn't a huge blow for me personally. Some people had put several years into it. It was really sad to see those guys have lots of work go."

Eight Days was further along that The Getaway 3 however, which was just a "tech demo" according to Bunn.

We've included the classic Eight Days trailer after the jump just to get your nostalgic juices flowing. It would be nice to see Studio London doing something more than casual games, but to be fair, the studio's output has been very strong in this area.

Perhaps the project will get resurrected at some point in the near future, but personally we wouldn't bank on it.

[Thanks Eurogamer]