Rockstar Games Canceled Bully Nintendo DS Port Says Report

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According to a new report speaking with former employees, Rockstar Games canceled Bully Nintendo DS port and Game Boy Advance version of The Warriors game. There are also some of the reasoning behind why The Warriors GBA was never released and some of its features.

Bully in a new perspective

Time Dilation released a report last week sharing details from anonymous ex-Rockstar Games developers who spoke with the outlet. One of the sources revealed that they were working on Bully for the Nintendo DS. This was developed at Rockstar Leeds right after Chinatown Wars. Another source, who could not confirm its existence, said it was plausible because technology from Chinatown Wars DS was reused.

The DS port was played from a top down perspective. It would have been significantly different in terms of gameplay to the home console versions. The same developer said, however, that the team didn’t go very far with this port. The reason it was canceled was the team at Rockstar Leeds was moved to a bigger title in the works. Time Extension believes it was LA Noire.

Details of the Warriors GBA port

“We went for four-player co-op using the link cable and stuff. We finished the game. It was actually fun to play.

Now onto another canceled Nintendo handheld port from Rockstar. Based on the 1979 film, The Warriors was released in 2005 and was a Rockstar Toronto production. The launch platforms were the PS2 and Xbox. A PSP port was made by Rockstar Leeds in 2007. Most recently it was made available on the PlayStation Network for PS3 and PS4 in 2016.

However, we have now learned how Rockstar canned a finished version of the game for Game Boy Advance. Why this is interesting is because of how different the GBA and PSP were. Two sources claimed that The Warriors game had a GBA port being developed at Rockstar Leeds.

One of those sources shared that the game was fun and over. It had 4 player cooperation using the connection cable of the Game Boy. It’s a shame that even though the game was “finished” it was never released.

One of the reasons why it never came out was apparently due to how popular the PSP became paired with a poor return on investment for Nintendo platforms. Also, Nintendo has always famously preferred having family friendly titles on their platforms over 18+ games and didn’t like to market such games. That’s why the PSP port appeared instead.

Time Dilation did an amazing job and has other Rockstar Games stories. For example, they started talking to one of the designers of the Rockstar Games logo. It illuminated how it was done. We covered this report here.

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