David Jaffe On Heartland, His PSP Game That Was Never Meant To Be

David Jaffe is best known for Twisted Metal and God of War. But some might recall the name Heartland, a PlayStation Portable game that he was developing around 2005-2007. Mostly because of his aim, which was to make gamers cry from the game. But it was shelved due to difficulties during production.

A number of years and games later, Jaffe decided to revisit Heartland, by posting pictures from the game design document onto his blog. Jaffe describes the game as:

"… a return to more old school, opened up single player (and co-op) Goldeneye/Doom II style level design. Plus a little Deus Ex thrown in, in terms of multiple solves, as much emergence as we could intentionally create (not the mention the happy surprises)."

And referencing the information that's detailed in the document, Jaffe goes on to explain:

"This ONLY woulda been an escort mission if you played it ONE way :). You could also get a sniper rifle AND turn on the power in the theme park (this level was gonna be like Disneyland meets Red Dawn). Doing so would let you activate the ferris wheel that you could use to ride up to a killer vantage point that would allow you to snipe the single enemy that was leading the troops that were trying to stop your buddy from getting away. Kill that guy and mission over. Your co-opbuddy could have also played the dude trying to escape..”

It's a real shame that Heartland never saw the light of day. It has been many years since the game's inception and we have yet to see a merging of Disneyland and Red Dawn from anyone else since.