A while ago I contacted Ben Fischer regarding Geist Force, that nice unreleased 3d shooter for Dreamcast. He kinda stopped writing after a while, but I managed to ask him some quetsions, and he even answered some of them.

&lt;b&gt;1. From what I seen and read, it was near completion. Why was the game canned then?&lt;/b&gt;

It got canned for a number of reasons.  From my perspective the 2 basic issues were that it took 25 minutes to complete the first 7 levels, and there weren't that many more than that.  (Bad consumer value.)  The second thing, ( and this was something I used to harp on,) but it wasn't all that fun, kind of a bad thing for a game.  The art direction was epic, and technically it was way ahead of almost anything else.  We developed a toolset for 3'rd party development teams that proved to pretty usefull, but it added to the development time, and it added to the development costs, and time of Geist.


&lt;b&gt;2. Could you describe what monsters and textures have you made for the game? Do you have some images of them or some concept are left?&lt;/b&gt;

If you look on my site, www.BenFischer.com there are renders of some of the monsters I made for Geist.  I am a production artist, so non of the designs are mine.  But anything on my site is 100% textured and modeled by me.  The Giant fat worm in the video was mine, but all these concepts were provided to me by either Peter Kim (Lead concept artist) or Shin Chien.  (I think I may have mispelled his name.  Shin Chien was a great art director.  He was hard to work for and demanding, however he garnered great respect form the other artists, because not only did he demand very high standards of production, but he also delivered them, and had a thourough understanding of the technical needs of game art, and had a powerful creative energy.  I think I made 10 monsters/ enemies, about 70% of the terrain, and window dressing for one level.  I did a lot of early fleshing out of Shins conceptual vision, (No where near the caliber of Peter Kim, and all dropped from the game.) and for 6 months of the 2 years I was on this I worked with a proprietary real time FX tools, creating the presets for many/many different particle effect for the game.  (Fire, explosions, Burning smoke, sparks, etc....


&lt;b&gt;3. What else have you done while working on Geist?&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;b&gt;4. Have you worked on any other games at Sega, apart from Geist?&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;b&gt;5. I saw the game called Geist Force. What's the difference?&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;b&gt;6. Do you have any other recollections of working at Sega? Any good / bad memories of working there? What was it like? Have you met anyone from STI? Sonic Team? SOJ?&lt;/b&gt;

I'm gonna try contacting him sometime, I'd love to see Geist dumped :P