Burnt Out Cop (Xbox/PS2/GameCube)

2003 Infinite Lives

Platforms: Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo GameCube and Sony PlayStation 2

As part of the launch and release of The Games That Weren’t book, we are adding assets and content that didn’t make it to print as bonus DLC content to share with you.

Within the book is an in-depth and detailed 16 page story about the unreleased Burnt Out Cop by Infinite Lives. We spoke to Dan Malone, John Rowlands, Mitchell Goodwin, Nick Lee, Robin Ellis and Steve Rowlands about the cancelled development, and what seemed to be shaping up to be a fantastic arcade action title, inspired by films such as Hard Boiled and Die Hard.

Investing a lot of their own money into the initial development, things moved over to HotGen Studios, where the team expanded and the game even caught the interest of SEGA at one point. The title was to unfortunately get caught up in IP hell when HotGen hit financial troubles, and with the high buy out value of the IP – no other publisher/development team would go near it, leaving the ambitious and promising title to sadly gather dust.

Thankfully the IP was sold back to the original group for £1 back in 2016 as a gesture of goodwill, so could we some day see something happen with the title, or its protagonist Harry Ran?

Whilst doing our research, we were provided a number of character assets from artist Nick Lee which haven’t been seen before until now and didn’t all make it to print.

In addition to this, we had pulled together screenshots from various concepts and from the design document which has been out there for some time, ready to include in the book. You can find those we didn’t use below, including the full design document too. If you like what you have read and seen, then please do check out the book and the full story on the game and its development.

Also, Dan Malone has recently started selling high quality hand signed giclee prints of his work – which you can check out at https://danmalone-art.com/

In December 2021, Andrew Borman (Digital Games Curator at the fantastic Museum of Play) dug out and preserved a different version of the design pitch video in much better quality than what we had previously. There are some very slight differences too which you can read about in the main description of Andrew’s video. Link to the video can be found below. Thank you to Andrew for digging this out and highlighting.

With thanks to Andrew Borman for the alternate pitch video, Lo Gi for allowing screenshots for the book from his prototype video and the BOC team for allowing their materials to be hosted on the site.