Bloody Hell, Prey 2 Lives! Or, The Curious Case of a Cyberpunk Bounty Hunter That Never Was
AI Gaming News Author · Rock Paper Shotgun ·
Recently leaked footage of Human Head Studios' cancelled Prey 2 shows off a vibrant, open-world cyberpunk bounty hunter game that looked surprisingly polished, sparking fresh debate on what could have been and the often-rocky relationship between developers and publishers.
Right, so you know how sometimes a forgotten spell scroll gets found in the dusty archives, and suddenly you realise the whole history of magic was nearly different? Well, that’s precisely the vibe I’m getting from the latest whispers echoing through the digital ether. We’re talking about **Prey 2**, mate – not Arkane’s brilliant immersive sim, but the one that Human Head Studios was cooking up, the one that got unceremoniously whisked away into the void over a decade ago.
Big thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun (rockpapershotgun.com) for their excellent initial reporting on these digital phantoms, which got my gears turning on this one. Because seriously, it’s never too late to feel a bit miffed about a truly promising game being binned, especially when fresh evidence keeps surfacing to show us just how much potential was squandered. And 'evidence' is the word of the day, as a new stash of leaked footage has popped up, giving us an even better look at the open-world cyberpunk bounty hunter game that Human Head had brewing.
I’ve been tinkering with these videos all morning, like a curious wizard poking at a forbidden artefact, and bloody hell, it’s wilder than it first appeared. We’re talking an opening sequence, a full mission playthrough from what looks like a genuinely sprawling open world, a flythrough of an undercity area, a prototype chase, and a good few glimpses of the combat. If you ever wondered what might have been, prepare to get a serious case of the 'what ifs'.
For those who might've missed the original *Prey* (2006) – a rather uneven, UFO-busting first-person shooter with some genuinely fancy portal tech that, funnily enough, almost feels eclipsed by other games now – its sequel was set to take a wildly different trajectory. Human Head started work on it fairly soon after the first, but the *real* development, as the story goes, kicked off in earnest once Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax Media, snapped up the rights. Where the first game was a bit of a linear rollercoaster ride through a space station, *Prey 2* was aiming for an open-world playground with a distinctly bounty-hunting flavour. Bethesda even announced it in 2011, and the hype train started chugging along.
But then, as often happens in this industry, the reality spell backfired. Human Head quietly put the brakes on the project towards the end of 2011. And here’s the kicker, according to former project lead Chris Rhinehart, they were “very close to an alpha state, with all major content pieces represented.” Imagine that! A game almost ready for its first big test, and suddenly, the plug gets pulled. Rumours swirled through 2012, and then Bethesda just… deleted it from their website. Poof. Gone like a bad spell.
Then came the twist. In 2013, reports surfaced that the project had been reassigned to the maestros behind *Dishonored*, Arkane Studios. The catch? All of Human Head’s work was apparently binned. Scrapped. Utterly gone. Bethesda finally just threw their hands up and officially cancelled *Prey 2* in 2014. A couple of years later, they announced Arkane would be developing a *series reboot*. Now, Arkane’s 2017 *Prey*? It’s a dashedly fine game, no doubt, a truly swoony and spacious immersive sim. But it's hard not to feel a pang for the road not taken, for the potential of Human Head's vision.
So, what actually happened? The full, unvarnished truth is probably still locked away in some corporate vault, guarded by legal dragons. But the whispers, the reports from back then, suggest a rather familiar narrative: Bethesda allegedly pushed tough deadlines and feature requests on an increasingly cash-strapped Human Head, all while supposedly looking to acquire the studio. Human Head, to their credit, eventually downed tools in protest when they couldn't haggle out a deal before their contract with Bethesda expired in 2012. Accounts of events differ, of course, as you’d expect when big money and creative visions collide. Bethesda has always maintained that the project just didn’t meet their standards. But having watched this leaked footage, I’m leaning with the original article's sentiment: Human Head should have been allowed to go the distance.
Because what these videos show isn't some janky, half-baked concept. It's a genuine vision. You’d have been playing as Killian Samuels, the beanie-wearing US marshal turned alien bounty hunter – a bit humdrum compared to the original’s Cherokee protagonist, Domasi 'Tommy' Tawodi, perhaps, but with a certain tragic charisma now, in hindsight. The game promised an open world bustling alien city, a kind of neon-soaked blend of Coruscant and G-Police. Imagine flitting through it, using boost-glide and ledge-grabs to get the drop on your targets. The videos reveal a teeming population of aliens, some of whom sound like they've got a bad case of laryngitis (charming!), and of course, no self-respecting cyberpunk dystopia is complete without a few nightclubs featuring holographic erotic dancers, right? You’d profile NPCs with a scanner, take them down with electric boladeros, and even enlist the odd Klatoonian as a meatshield. Fair dinkum, that sounds like a good time!
I reckon I’m more sold on the setting than just the mechanics from these snippets – the passing hovercars, the cargo trains, the distant flying billboards with what looks like another whole FPS playing on them – it’s a living, breathing world. Out of context, sure, it looks like a project that absolutely had legs. But that’s the tragedy, isn't it? We'll never truly know whether Human Head could have seen it through. The studio eventually closed its doors in 2019, adding another name to the growing list of developers whose stories ended too soon. Beanieman RIP.
It’s a bittersweet reminder of the roads not taken, the spellbooks unwritten in the grand tapestry of gaming history. Every time one of these old ghosts surfaces, it makes you wonder what other incredible, lost experiences are lurking out there, waiting to be unearthed. And it certainly makes you question the narrative, doesn't it? What corporate standard was so high that it couldn't accommodate something that looked this… *fun*?
It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the games industry itself: creative vision meeting corporate reality, with players often caught in the crossfire, left to mourn the games that never quite made it out of the digital ether. And honestly, it makes you appreciate every genuine innovation and developer success story all the more. Because for every *Prey 2* that slips through our fingers, there’s a thousand different possibilities that might just blow a hole through reality and show us something truly amazing. Here's hoping we see more of those.
Tags: Gaming History, Cyberpunk, Cancelled Games, Game Development, FPS
Original article: Rock Paper Shotgun