News/6GUN - BattleBourne's Unreleased PlayStation 2 Game
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6GUN (May 31, 2005 prototype)
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Today we present yet another unreleased game for Sony’s PlayStation 2 - BattleBorne Entertainment’s lost title - 6GUN, courtesy of goilup and Cereth who were kind enough to share this with us!
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BattleBorne Entertainment was a short-lived company that was best known for Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox back in 2005. Combat Elite was to be published by Acclaim, which would soon file for bankruptcy and shut down sometime in 2005. Combat Elite was actually finished and was ready to be released by the summer of 2004, but due to the loss of its publisher, the game was delayed by almost a full year before being picked up by publisher SouthPeak Interactive. Soon after the development of Combat Elite was nearing completion, BattleBorne’s second game began development by using the assets and engine from Combat Elite. This title would become 6Gun (or Six Gun depending on the source), and was informally announced on BattleBorne’s website sometime in January of 2005, before being fully announced via a press release in February of that same year.
Originally announced for Xbox, PlayStation 2, and PC, 6Gun is a military-themed third-person tactical shooter spread across four missions and 12 planned levels. You lead a group of “GUNSLINGERS”, a classified military unit under SOCOM, ordered to find a missing secondary group of GUNSLINGERS in complete secrecy. The game was to emphasize tactical decision-making by utilizing small unit combat in various situations such as hostage rescue, demolition, and snipping from helicopter gunship. The game was announced with a planned release for 2006. Aside from a few screenshots, this was all the information there was on the game itself. A port on the PlayStation Portable (PSP) was also announced later sometime in May of 2005 with a planned release in the Summer of 2006, presumably following the same gameplay offerings as its console ports. A demo of at least the console ports was planned to appear at the E3 press conference in 2005, but it’s unknown if such a demo was ever shown. Later that same month, a sequel for 6Gun, dubbed 6Gun II, was slated for development exclusively for the PlayStation 3.
However, BattleBorne itself would close up shop sometime in early 2006, resulting in all projects being canceled. Aside from a few screenshots, there were no other tidbits of information about any of the ongoing projects at BattleBorne after the release of Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers. Like most unreleased games, the game had a moment in the spotlight and disappeared into obscurity never to be seen ever again.
In early 2023, we were contacted by goilup who discovered a stray DVD-R inside a PS2 TOOL devkit previously owned by BattleBorne Entertainment. The devkit itself didn’t have any builds on it, but it was discovered that the DVD-R inside contained a partially playable build of 6Gun! The game appears to be an early demo build presenting itself as a little sandbox where you can get a feel for the gameplay and combat of the project. Despite listing 3 possible “levels” upon start-up, only the first and third levels on the list can be loaded. The game seems to only contain data for two levels. Unfortunately, it was discovered after we received a dump of the disc that there appear to be missing sectors that affect the last file on the disc, MUZFLASH.LMP, which might result in further crashes. We don’t know if the missing sectors are a result of a bad burn or a bad dump, but we haven’t been able to get a redump of the disc in time for release. We made an attempt to fill in the missing sector data with null bytes to hopefully prevent the game from crashing further, but we don’t know if it ultimately made a positive impact on the game itself. As such, we present both the original dump as it was sent and a repair attempt to hopefully get the game running a little better.
We’d like to thank goilup and Cereth for providing this game for the community to check out! We hope others may find other interesting things on the game disc that might not be easily accessible and see just what BattleBorne was cooking around the time of the game’s ultimate demise.
See you next time!
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