Update 05/07/2020 : Animator Jonathan Cooper, who worked at Ubisoft Montreal, has confirmed that the video is real and belongs to a canceled game. Of course, it is not exactly gameplay, but a pre-rendered animation that was presented to the directors of Ubisoft. Cooper also explains that, unfortunately, the French firm is more likely to cancel Prince of Persia games than other sagas. This is because Jordan Mechner, its original creator, still has the rights, so Ubisoft’s profit margin is lower than with other games.
It’s not uncommon for a game to be canceled before it’s even announced . Imagine the number of projects that we will never know because they did not exceed the company’s internal expectations. The one that concerns us today could be classified like this, but something curious has happened.
It turns out that Prince of Persia was going to have a new main installment after The Forgotten Sands, but it was eventually canceled. We have known it thanks to this gameplay uploaded to the PositiveLauncher channel (discovered by a Resetera user). The curious thing of all is that it has been on YouTube since 2012 , but it had gone completely unnoticed until now.
Guiding us by the title of the video, this canceled installment was going to be called Prince of Persia: Redemption . What you can see there is not a trailer published by Ubisoft, far from it, but a full-blown leak that managed to evade all radars (the opposite of what the leaks intend, all is said). The game was never even advertised.
Well, actually, someone did see it. Best of all, the video has a comment posted two years ago by Marc-Andre Belleau, Technical Director at Ubisoft, saying “where did you get this from !?” . In addition, the Linkedin profile of Christophe Prelot, a former Ubisoft developer, mentions having worked between 2010 and 2011 on a canceled Prince of Persia , so we can assume that this is it.
The truth is that what you see in the video is not bad at all . Lots of parkour, action, and time-manipulating mechanics typical of the franchise. The staging is spectacular even today, and that it is a PS3 and Xbox 360 game.
