StarCraft: Ghost, one of Blizzard’s notorious canceled projects, just had a playable build leak online. Andrew Borman, digital games curator for the Museum of Play, has brought the leak’s existence to public attention after tweeting some screenshots, though he clarified that he has nothing to do with the new findings. In fact, no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the return of StarCraft: Ghost. As of now, this Xbox version of the game is still available to download online.
Note that this is not from me, has nothing to do with my work, and was posted anonymously throughout various Xbox groups. Just reporting the news.
— Andrew Borman (@Borman18) February 16, 2020
As pointed out at Kotaku, the most likely explanation regarding how StarCraft: Ghost made it online is that someone got their hands on an Xbox dev kit containing the game and decided to publish a downloadable version. YouTube user Delso Bezerra uploaded some of the earliest footage of the build, sharing seven minutes of new gameplay. What’s shown lacks polish, sure, but considering it was announced nearly two decades ago for Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, StarCraft: Ghost could pass as a finished title. Either way, this footage and a lot of the information likely to come out in the near future will provide some of the best glimpses at what could have come of the game.
The game was to be a third-person, stealth-action spinoff set in the StarCraft universe that followed an operative named Nova. Developed first by Nihilistic Software and later by Swingin’ Ape Studios, Blizzard didn’t officially acknowledge that StarCraft: Ghost had been put to rest until 2014, though they had acknowledged as far back as 2006 that the game was postponed “indefinitely.”
