Twenty years on, a cancelled Daredevil PS2 game is now playable

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, originally meant to release in 2003 but never saw the light of day, is now playable for the first time.

There are plenty of games that get announced, have all the right ingredients, but still get cancelled for one reason or another. You would think that a character like Daredevil, who was receiving a film starring Ben Affleck of all people in 2003, might be a guaranteed success for a video game, but unfortunately The Man Without Fear was left on the cutting room floor. However, Hidden Palace, a videogame preservation group, has managed to release a working version of the game that you can play right now.

As Hidden Palace detailed, Daredevil: The Man Without Fear was a “third-person beat ‘em up action game based on the Frank Miller Marvel superhero comic of the same name developed by 5,000 Ft. studios.” It was originally planned to release on the PS2, original Xbox, and PC, but it saw a number of issues throughout development. At the time, being a third-party developed game, it had to be approved by the product evaluation departments at Sony and Microsoft.

Apparently Microsoft had a “very hands-off approach to the evaluation procedure,” partially because it was so new to the industry back then. But Sony apparently made “several demands on the game that would eventually drain more of the developer’s limited resources.” Aside from that, development was supposedly smooth to start, however 5,000 Ft. decided to make its own game engine after a few months, which resulted in more problems. After a while, a number of staff members would leave the project, and ultimately Marvel itself refused to approve the game because of all of the changes Sony recommended.

However, the game was apparently almost done before it was actually cancelled, and now thanks to “an anonymous developer who worked on the original game,” a copy of the game has now been dumped. Thanks to the work of someone by the name of SolidSnake11, you can even play it now, even if there are a number of bugs.

It’s always a shame when games don’t get to be released despite almost being done, so even if it will never be finished, at least we can finally see what Daredevil: The Man Without Fear is like for ourselves.