Indeed, Virgin's history is littered with the smouldering corpses of dead games. Another potentially high-profile title that never made it was Escape From LA, based upon the movie of the same name. Given the dreadfulness of this sequel to the glorious Escape From New York, it's probably just as well. It's likely Virgin would have also published Capcom's Major Damage, a platform-based cartoon shoot 'em up which crashed and burned, along with the Japanese developers' attempts at establishing a US studio. Drive 'em up Propaganda is another name on Virgin's rollcall of missing-in-action games.

As with Thrill Kill, dodgy content was likewise behind the disappearance of Sensible Software's highly anticipated Sex And Drugs And Rock N' Roll. The independently developed PC rock star management game had been in development for some time and was widely featured by the gaming press. However, the efforts of Sensible to find a publisher for the game resulted in doors being slammed in their faces. It was deemed too controversial by every publisher in the country and so was never released, virtually crippling the finances of the company.

Certainly, Sega's slide towards near financial ruin can be attributed to a pair of cancellations:
Sonic 4 and Sonic X-Treme. Had the games appeared on their intended systems, the Mega Drive and Saturn respectively, they may have helped to keep the money wolves from soiling Sega's door. Sonic 4 was to be a bold experiment; the game took the established Sonic gameplay and turned it into something resembling a physicist's nightmare. Whereas previously Sonic had free reign to run and spin around his world, in Sonic 4 he was to be tethered to his long-time companion Tails via a short elastic band. The appeal of the game was intended to be in mastering the complex control method. However, Sega wisely realised fairly early on that the complex control method resulted in an almost unplayable game.

Sonic X-Treme was going to be the biggie though, the game which catapulted the Saturn ahead of the PlayStation. It was previewed on video at an E3 show in the US to a cacophony of wailing and barely stifled sniggers. The appalling, muddy, glitchy, psychedelic, abstract 3D visuals were shamed by the nearby Super Mario 64, and Sega chose instead to convert the woefully underpowered and misleadingly titled Sonic 3D to the Saturn, thus accelerating the format's demise.