Starcraft: Ghost gameplay leaks, 14 years after its cancellation

A development build of Blizzard’s cancelled action game, Starcraft: Ghost has seemingly leaked onto the internet.

A number of videos showing extensive gameplay of the cancelled game have appeared online, via Kotaku, showing what is said to be a publicly available development build running on an original Xbox.

StarCraft: Ghost was announced almost two decades ago, in 2002. The GameCube, Xbox and PS2 action game was eventually cancelled (or put on “indefinite hold,” in Blizzard’s wording) sometime around 2006, following numerous delays.

Ghost was set to take place four years after the conclusion of StarCraft: Brood War and follow the story of Nova, a young ghost agent—a human espionage operative with psychic abilities.

Despite the game’s cancellation, the backstory for Nova was released in the novel StarCraft Ghost: Nova by Keith R. A. DeCandido.

Nova also appeared in campaign missions for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm and Nova Covert Ops.

In a July 2016 Polygon article, it was suggested that Ghost was cancelled due to the arrival of Xbox 360 in 2005, which meant significant resources would be required to port the project, plus the runaway success of World of Warcraft.