Team SAS (Xbox, PlayStation 2) - Games That Weren't

2003 Rage Bristol / Dangerous Games Ltd.

Platforms: Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation 2

Also known as: Andy McNab – Team SAS

As you’ll be aware, the games industry is a turbulent one, where projects (and even companies) can often fail and result in cancellations. The team who would be assigned to working on Team SAS were described as amazing, and had not long just come off from completing the award-winning B-17 Flying Fortress – the Mighty 8th and were now about to embark on a new development called Team SAS.

Working with the team was SAS veteran Andy McNab, who donned a skinsuit and gave the game’s motion capture a realism that no normal actor could match. Level designer Stuart Maine revealed that the game also had a lot of animators and was very much animation driven.

Stuart and the team for instance had to plot spline routes through the levels for all four characters, which took a very long time to get right. The advantage is that it made the characters look incredibly realistic and could do animations that matched to the environment.

Also, as all four SAS members would move along their splines, pausing to wait for each other to keep up, the game was technically a zero to four-player experience. The player could choose any of the four to play, but you didn’t actually need any of them – the characters could play the levels on their own (just not quite as good as a human player).

Although there were some tactics involved, the game mainly took an arcade-style approach – with inspiration from the likes of Virtual Cop / Time Crisis (with similar kinds of visuals), but with the ability to explore all of the environment, rather than running on rails. The team summed up the game as “an arcade shoot-em up with dense jungle warfare and ultra-cool SAS teamwork”.

For the story, it’s basically your job as part of an elite SAS team to fight through enemy territory and thwart a nuclear threat, with fast paced arcade gameplay. You would work with your team-mates, and there was also co-operative play (with local only split screen options), meaning there would be something for everyone within the depths of the jungle.

Each player had their own specialisms: John Riley is the leader and uses a shotgun to put down a lot of fire. Victoria Taylor is the scout and bomb disposal expert. Jose Sanchez is the ranger and sniper, whilst Mark Carlton is the large muscular guy with the mini-gun to puts the world to rights.

As well as being on foot within locations such as underground sewers and within the jungle, you would also at one point be riding on a gunboat that travels along the river, shooting at buildings and other boats along the way in a more on-rails series of level segments.

After over a year or so, the game was starting to shape up very well and began to feature in the press to much anticipation.

Unfortunately, with the collapse of Rage in 2003, the project was suddenly in desperate trouble. The rights to the game were however brought back from the receivers and Dangerous Games Ltd was set up in Bristol to continue the project with its planned publisher. The game at this point had become one of Xbox Magazine’s ‘most anticipated’ titles as well, and hence why there was a desperation to keep things going.

Development would continue for a while longer, but when the title was originally developed under Rage, a PS2 edition was being developed by another studio in the Rage family. When Rage had gone under, the Dangerous Games team decided to keep the other studio working on the PS2 conversion, rather than bring it in house (which was one of their options).

Unbeknown to Dangerous Games, the other studios hadn’t got paid when Rage went under, so the studio working on the PS2 edition had moved their team off Team SAS to work on other projects. Although an agreement was made to maintain the previous relationship, the other team never really committed back to the project.

As a result, during the next publisher review, the Xbox version looked amazing, but the PS2 was well behind and not looking great at all. Although the Xbox graphics were generally a lot better, money was made off PS2 sales, as the install base was much greater. With no confidence in the PS2 edition, the publisher dropped the title.

After trying to shop the Xbox version and engine around to other publishers, there was just no interest in an Xbox only title. Sadly it meant that the team would disband, costing not only a game – but a team and a studio too.

The game wasn’t to be forgotten, and there would be the odd reminiscing of the title from various websites who recalled the promising previews of the game. In 2024, level designer Stuart Maine got in touch to see if Games That Weren’t could recover the prototype that he had from when the studio closed.

As a result, and for the very first time after being missing for 21 years, here is a demo build from the Xbox edition, which is labelled as a Pre E3 build. We are not sure how close to final the build is at this stage (we think it is pretty close to final!), but there are a number of levels present which are fully playable and with the odd cut scene too. Only chapters 2, 3 and 5 are available (nothing else seemingly on the disc), which might be the only sections that were playable at the time.

There is also an option to have free roaming on the maps, though it is quite glitchy and requires first loading one of the levels, quitting back to the menu and then going to the option. You’ll need a controller set to Port 4 to be able to move around. There could yet be a way of accessing another menu to load other level files, so there could be more to discover. If you find anything interesting, please do let us know.

As you might expect, there are glitches in the game itself, and sometimes it can crash out. The gunfire sounds are quite heavy too, and would have been toned down for the final release I’m sure. It may also be an emulator issue too. The Frontend Heli interior part doesn’t load, but might be accessible.

NOTE: We had to bump up the system memory to 128MiB, used mcpx_1.0 for the boot ROM, xbox-4627_debug.bin for the Flash ROM and a pre-built Xbox HDD. We had no problems running on a modded Xbox.

Overall, it as a great glimpse at what is a very promising looking arcade title that could have been a huge amount of fun. We can see why the team were desperate to try and save it and keep it going – and its a shame that it didn’t quite happen. Check it out for yourself!

With huge thanks to Stuart Maine for helping us to save remains of the game from the prototype disc and a lot of materials and information which we have been able to add here. As more comes to light, we’ll continue to update this page.

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