A leak of a development build of Starcraft: Ghost has finally given us a look at one of the highest-profile vaporware titles in the history of gaming. The game was announced in September 2002, and development was put on hold in March 2006. However, Starcraft: Ghost wasn’t officially canceled until 2014. Besides a few videos and images circulated by games media in the early 2000s and several demos at Blizzard events, Starcraft: Ghost has mostly remained a mystery until now.
The leaked Xbox build of Starcraft: Ghost dates back to 2004, around the time development of the game was handed from Nihilistic Software to Swingin’ Ape Studios. Unfortunately, that means we’re not able to see the final version of the game before it was unofficially canceled in 2006.
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The leaked build shows the game in a state where, according to the developers, Starcraft: Ghost had an identity crisis. In addition to being very unfinished, this build lacks a focus on combat or stealth. As such, the gameplay itself feels somewhat dull. However, you can see what Nihilistic was going for, and the foundation is there for what could have been an exciting game.
Editor’s Note: Please, don’t ask where to download the Starcraft: Ghost leaked build.
There’s a surprising amount of content in this build, though you’ll have a hard time getting some of it to play. As this is a development build, it only works decently on an Xbox with 128mb of RAM. Unfortunately, retail versions of the console only come with 64mb of RAM, so you’ll need a dev kit or modded Xbox to play the majority of the six levels available.
Additionally, the leak is poorly optimized, so even with 128mb of RAM, it has performance issues. It’s also possible to run with build in the Cxbx-Reloaded emulator, but you’ll experience graphical glitches and frequent crashes.
Starcraft: Ghost is one of the highest-profile unreleased games ever. It graced magazine covers, had a novelization, and was a highly anticipated title that just fell off the radar. It seems that after Swingin’ Ape took over development, things were going well, but the projected release date fell too close to the launch of the next generation of consoles. In the end, lousy timing instead of a bad product killed Starcraft: Ghost, and hopefully, we’ll someday get to see a later build of the game that’ll give us an even better look at what the game could have been.
