Detective Harry Callahan is one of Clint Eastwood's most enduring characters, and starred in some seminal action movies back in the '70s and '80s. Eastwood's no-nonsense cop would inspire countless clones in both movies and video games, and back in 2004 Warner Brothers decided that it was time that Callahan was resurrected for an entirely new audience.
Dirty Harry Extreme was to be an action video game produced with the intimate involvement of Eastwood himself. It was slated to appear on pretty much every platform of the period, including the Wii and DS. However, Warner Brothers halted work in 2007 because it was displeased with progress, and attempts to restart producing failed. The project was eventually cancelled when the publisher decided that there was no way a reasonable game could be created. Years of development, cash and Eastwood's valuable time had been wasted — the Hollywood legend was to lend his voice to the game as well as act as a consultant, and apparently spent a significant portion of time refining the script. To give you an idea of just how big the project was, it was also set to feature the vocal talents of Laurence Fishburne, Lucy Liu and Gene Hackman.
Envisaged as a cover-based shooter with a unique reputation system which made enemies react differently depending on how trigger-happy you were, Dirty Harry Extreme was an ambitious undertaking. While the Wii version would have been a variation of the PlayStation 2 game with motion controls attached, the DS version is rather more interesting, and would have been built from the ground up.
You can read the entire story about Dirty Harry Extreme's development and subsequent cancellation here — in the meantime, there's this trailer which was shown behind closed doors at E3 2006. Clearly pre-rendered, it shouldn't be taken as gameplay footage, and was created by an external studio. Even so, it gives a hint of just how amazing a video game starring Harry Callahan could have been.
[source unseen64.net]
Comments 14
A Dirty Harry Video Game would be great as long as it wasn't one dimensional.
There is certainly a lot of material to work with even today. Just turn on the news.
A sort of anti-hero game would be good. Marvellous in fact.
It's too bad it was cancelled. I remember when it was announced and I was already comparing it to 'True Crimes Streets of L A'.
Darn...A game like this could have been good enough to blow our heads clean off.
DS-screenshots look really good
Wtf? How the hell could those <expletive> not be able to make a <expletive> good game with that kind of source material? Bunch of stupid <expletive>... Seems to me it has a lot more <expletive> story and action in it than 99 <expletive> percent of the current <expletive> games aimed at fans of the <expletive> fps/action genre.
Guess they weren't feeling lucky...
I wholeheartedly agree that if they still have the <expletive> source material lying around somewhere, it should be updated graphics-wise and published. I'm pretty sure there's a <expletive> market for it...
DISCLAIMER:
Expletives were added to adhere to the Dirty Harry form factor and were in no means intended to insult the writer of this article or other commenters.
Aw, <expletive> it...
In the trailer its rating is "RP" now add "FOREVEEEEEER!"
Too bad, it looks like it'd be good.
I'm a fan of the movies, and Clint Eastwood in general, but no matter how much I like the tagline, I don't feel unlucky. It COULD have been great, sure, given the source material... But so COULD the Max Payne movie...
need to play this...
A game with a liscense and the name Extreme plastered on it? I can't see this ever being anything but shovelware.
I remember seeing this all the time on a sizzle reel when I worked at Gamecrazy. Saw it about a million times a day, so it was a little funny when it never even got made.
It's unfortunate that a game with this much blood sweat and tears had to be cancelled, but sometimes being overly ambitious is not a good thing. Maybe it was cancelled for the better. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever. I'd have rather that game remained a fever dream than the soul crushing disappointment it became.
WOuld have been interesting to see a Dirty Harry game, shame it was cancelled.
Shame to see it got canned as I would love to play a Dirty Harry game.
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