According to VandenBerghe, the game was a tactical third person shooter based on the real-life Devil’s Brigade, a division comprised of the United States’ most troublesome troops and Canada’s most decorated, who were so brutal and efficient, they would inspire the formation of the Green Berets and the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command.
According to game designer James Schomer, ”They found a factory that made stickers. I kid you not: they got a bunch of stickers printed up that were just black stickers with white text that said, in German, ‘The Worst is yet to come.’ And they would go through these trenches unscrupulously slitting everybody’s throats. They would slap these stickers on their faces and helmets. So the German’s started calling them the Black Devils. We had a lot of talks about how we would position that for dramatic showcase, how can we involve the player in placing these stickers and stuff like that.”
The studio, Underground Development, pitched the idea to Activision in mid-2007, and created a 15 minute “vertical slice” of a squad-based shooter set in Italy. Schomer stated that the demo wasn’t very cinematic, but it did effectively show what the game was all about.
Unfortunately, the developers had picked the wrong time to pitch a project. Despite positive feedback and the appearance that the project was gaining momentum, Activision merged with Vivendi in December 2007 and the project got “lost in the shuffle”. It was finally canceled in March 2008. Lead designer Kyle Brink stated: “We were ready for our final green light just as the merger with Vivendi/Blizzard was announced. As is normal in a merger, you do everything you can to clean up your balance sheet.”
Some of the reasons VandenBerghe gave as to why the project was dropped included the high costs of developing in San Francisco, the development team’s lack of any sort of pedigree, and the risky gameplay.
”A studio that isn’t in full production on a title with major revenue attached to it, which is about to ask for tens of millions in development dollars, is a great candidate for closure at that point. Was this also a way to keep IW happy after they had just produced Modern Warfare and made a hojillion dollars? Perhaps, but nobody ever put it to us that way,” sighed VandenBerghe.
VandenBerghe is now a creative director at Ubisoft, working on Far Cry 3.