BioWare Talks About Abandoned Game: Five Fingers of Death

Can you imagine using the Baldur's Gate engine to power a game about kicking ass with kung fu? BioWare's Greg Zeschuk could. Much to fellow doctor Ray Muzyka's chagrin, Greg went into detail at last night's DICE 2011 keynote about a game pitch they worked up for Five FIngers of Death that was never picked up.

When asked about some of the mistakes they've made in development, Greg said he'd rather tell us one of the funniest things he'd ever done in development, leaving Ray shaking his head. Supposedly videotape of this pitch actually exists, so let's hope it surfaces some day.

"It was a kung fu game set in the Baldur's Gate universe. The idea was that you would take the Baldur's Gate engine, and make a kung fu game out of that. But we always thought cutscenes cost a lot of money, and were hard to make, so we thought why don't we take kung fu movie footage and just redub it? And so that's what we did.

We had little kung fu fights in the Baldur's Gate engine, and I actually did most of the voices in this really, really cheesy thing that I spent weeks cutting together in the first version of premiere. We sent it out and people just thought we were insane. We sent it to Interplay, and they basically just laughed us out of the building. I look back and that, and I'm like 'Thank god.' If we had actually made that, I don't know what would have happened."

What would have happened?! It sounds awesome! Somewhere at DICE I'm sure a developer thought this was an exciting idea, and is going to start slapping kung fu cutscenes together. You'd save a bundle and be able to put all of your money into the chopsocky.