Second Midway/Woo game cancelled? News

Action-film maestro John Woo may have been making another game for Midway called Gunrunner.

The publisher - now known as Tradewest Games after a recent buyout - wouldn't comment, but former staff hawking their wares were less tight-lipped.

The evidence, compiled by superannuation, begins with Sleepwalker|Media, which produced storyboards and CGI mock-ups for the project.

Those pre-visualisations of "Midway Games' prototype, Gunrunner" can be found on Sleepwalker|Media's website. They show a "Wow Moment", otherwise known as a car causing havoc in a busy city.

The blurb mentions emulating the style of the Bourne films, which apparently required the Midway team to "greatly enhance" the motion blur and depth-of-field capabilities of the Gunrunner engine.

No mention of John Woo yet, although a "Wow Moment" could be a "Woo Moment".

The next exhibit comes from the LinkedIn profile of Robert Morgan, who claims to have been a "tools/engine programmer on Stranglehold and Gunrunner" for Midway between 2005 and 2008. He now works for a gambling company.

Stranglehold, remember, was Woo's completed collaboration with Midway that we gave 8/10 to.

Our final exhibit is the resume of Chris de Priest, who claims to have had a lead animator position on "cancelled title Gunrunner" for Midway Games, between May 2008 and December 2008.

Gunrunner is a term referred to often in John Woo's work, particularly Hard Boiled, the film around which Stranglehold was based. Those dates also suggest the game was more up-to-date and perhaps advanced than we had thought.

Woo has recently finished and released epic war film Red Cliff across Asia. The story is based on a battle from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (or the story of the reunification of China), but was received with little enthusiasm.

What he's up to now, no one seems to know. In 2007, John Woo and Warren Spector joined forces to simultaneously develop a film and a game called Ninja Gold. Nothing seems to have come of that, and Spector now focuses on what is believed to be Wii game Epic Mickey for Disney.