YoYo - Cancelled PS1 3D Platformer

[OCG]

Opening this thread in hopes someone can help in tracking down prototype of this as I have confirmation about it's existence:



I have contacted Keith Goeham - Lead Environment Artist at MagicArts on his email to see if he knew something about this game and if he still had a prototype. He told me that he gave copy of prototype to his friend who then supposedly gave it to his friends and it eventually got either lost or stolen.

He also told me that YoYo programming team went on to found Secret Level Games, which was later bought by Sega Studios San Francisco

Jeremy Gordon was lead programmer and Keith assured me that most likely Jeremy has prototype and that he would be interested in getting ISO if I manage to get it from Jeremy (either ISO or buying disc depending what would Jeremy offer).

I have not been able to find Jeremy's email but I found his Twitter and LinkedIn. Sadly when I tried messaging on Twitter, he never even read message which means it was most likely in spam filter and on LinkedIn he either does not check it often or does not wish to approve me there for personal reasons.

Is anyone from this community interested in helping me track down this beta?

 

[Allie]

I seem to recall Secret Level's first project after joining Sega was the Dreamcast conversion of Unreal Tournament, but weren't they also briefly toying with the idea of resurrecting YoYo for this platform? I'm sure I once read that somewhere, though I can't find any evidence of this online - I might have to dive into the Wayback Machine and see if it was mentioned on either SegaWeb or GameOnline, since those were the two main news sites I followed around this time.

Please don't quote me on this, but wasn't the team behind this game also quite well known for its SDK work? Despite the plan to have Sony publish YoYo, I'm fairly sure MagicArts was never tied to any one platform, and I seem to recall it once being suggested they might have been responsible for one of those earliest Dreamcast tech demos shown at E3 in 1998, possibly even the one set inside a room designed to show off various texture and particle effects.

As for where to find a copy of YoYo, I really wish that I could help. At the very least, I hope you find some of this information potentially useful...

 

[OCG]

Hmm, I actually never heard of something like this so its unfortunate if article is missing. I did ask Keith if he has any idea is Yoyo as a character and whole game concept copyrighted or not and he said he was not sure as he was only Lead Environment Artist and was not involved in any business stuff but if there was idea of bringing it to Dreamcast it means that means most likely Sega today owns rights to YoYo since they bought the studio even if they are maybe fully unaware of it or have forgotten about it.

I also am not sure if this team was involved for SDK work so it would be great if someone could confirm.

One other thing I know about PS1 version is that game was literally cancelled one day after Spyro 2 came out because Sony thought game could not compete with Spyro despite that according to Keith's claim team did many new stuff that Sony never even checked out. They just brutally killed the game without even giving team chance to showcase latest changes. Game seems to have had troubled development at start but whole team reorganized later on and made more progress in 2 weeks than they did in previous 9 months however Sony executive had baised opinion towards what was seen before new progress and without looking at it cancelled game.

If anyone reading this has any email of Jeremy Gordon or Sega Studios San Francisco staff, please let me know.