2000 Trecision
Platform: PC
Gaming historian Damiano Gerli of The Genesis Temple in August 2021 produced a wonderful 3 part article on the history of Italian video game developer Trecision, which we highly recommend checking out if you haven’t already at https://genesistemple.com/the-history-of-trecision-software-part-i-let-the-games-do-the-talking
Within the 3rd part of the article, Damiano talks about a cancelled title named Samhain, which was in development around 2000 by the company. An in-house title that was being put together by a small team within Trecision, consisting of Federico Fasce, Marco Castrucci, Alessandro Giusti, Stefano Mariani and Tommaso Bennati.
Federico Fasce informed Damiano that the team had come to him with a FPS prototype that featured a “terrific gothic mood”. They had even taken pictures of graves from Rapallo’s cemetery at night time for textures. Federico felt though it should be more of a survival horror type game, than an actual first person shooter.
It was revealed that the narrative at an early stage was around the Wicca Pagan religion (or at least inspired by it), where Federico researched into the religion and wanted to “use that vibe for the story”. The gameplay itself would be influenced by titles such as Deus Ex, where the team wanted an interactive story and not just a simple action sequence based game.
The team captured textures and imagery for the game from the town of Triora, which was known as the “village of witches”, as it was felt to fit with the overall mood for the game.
Previewing at E3
After what we believe were a few months of development, the team put together a demo for 2000’s E3 event. Unfortunately Federico revealed that the game didn’t get any publisher interest and would be quietly cancelled as a result.
The demo for the time was particularly impressive, as it ran on most PC’s at the time and looked brilliant too. There wasn’t much to do apart from walk around part of the environment, but it was enough to set the mood.
Federico very kindly allowed Damiano to release the E3 demo to the world, which Damiano has in kind passed onto GTW to create a page specifically on the game. You can now check it out for yourself and get a glimpse of what could have been a great survival horror game, had it picked up more interest at E3. Sadly some things are just not to be.
With thanks to Damiano Gerli of The Genesis Temple for his research and findings which has enabled us to create this page on the game.
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What a strange sight to see. I once had a nightmare that had me inside of a dark cold room that had an identical appearance to the crypt images here… that cannot be possible for me to remember an E3 event because I was only 3 in 2000, and I have never been to an E3 festival in my life… strangest of all, I had never seen this picture before tonight. Just like Jack said in The Shining “We all have our moments of Deja Vu, but this was ridiculous.” How could I possibly remember seeing such an eerie tomb when in fact I never have? That is the type of vibe this demo is giving off to me.
What a fantastic Halloween treat! Thanks for the E3 demo release. So rare devs are willing to share like this.