Dirty Harry, the game
The first of our 'games that never made it' feature
No, I kid you not, they were really going to make a Dirty Harry game. To be set in between the first two films, the game was to focus on SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan as he pursues the serial killer Scorpio. One of the creative aims driving its production was to further develop the character of Dirty Harry himself, a man so ridiculously bad-ass that even people misquoting him sound cool by association.
Those of you familiar with the film/franchise (if that doesn’t include you, you need to do better at life) will appreciate how the man walks a fine line between being the best damn cop the force has ever seen and a psycho with a police license to shoot people. The game planned to hone in on this using a responsive AI whereby if you went easy on criminals and played nice, there would be plenty of photos of you in the newspapers, but at the cost of difficulty – after all, how do you police people who aren’t afraid?
Of course, you could go the other way (and I can only assume I probably would have) where you beat seven shades of shit out of just about everyone and the city will never have been safer, even if you’re in the chief of police’s office at the end of every mission. Think that’s a cliché? This movie invented the cliché.
Did I mention free roam around the entire city of San Francisco? No I didn’t, because I wanted to blow your mind with it at the end like I just did there. Mind not blown sufficiently? Clint Eastwood was going to do the voice acting. Alas due to ‘trouble’ at creators The Collective’s studio, this game joins a depressingly long list of things that will forever be just a really awesome trailer.
