It could have been: the Dirty Harry video game

It's another month, and I have to give a big hat tip to Razorfist for reminding me about this one when listening to one of his streams a while back, and motivating me to make a post on it. 

Back in the early 2000's there was a little video game developer studio called The Collective, which was given the rights to make an official Dirty Harry video game and was to be published by Warner Bros. Now, before I go any further, you'll have to put on some music to read the rest here. 

The developers described it as being set in the time period between the first two films, Dirty Harry and Mangum Force and was meant to have an original storyline to give more depth to the character of Harry Callahan as you play him. 

The game was to feature a fully free-roaming/open world 1972 San Francisco, which would have been pretty amazing for the time, and the devs stated along the lines that the city of San Francisco would be a character unto itself. 

The other only known aspect to the gameplay was to be that you had to straddle the line between rouge and good cop. With the devs planning to have reactive AI for both crooks and cops that would react to the player's choices. The idea being that if you were too soft on crooks, they may not take the player (Harry Callahan) seriously, but if you were too brutal, it will put you in trouble with the police chief.

Unfortunately, the studio was having financial troubles and the game was cancelled back in 2007, which was not very long into it's development, and the studio went under. 

I can't begin to tell you what I unspeakable things I would do for this project to be resurrected and fully realized. Can you imagine if they had different crimes you follow like storylines based on the book series, or I would still love it if you just played through alternate versions of the first three movies. 

Holy freaking awesome sauce if they could get all those stories into a game.

Hell, just to have a game with a fully realized early 1970s San Francisco that actually feels alive would be amazing just by itself (Watch Dogs 2 was a boring piece of crap that doesn't count). Also, seeing the success of games like LA Noire makes me think that a far more politically incorrect and action oriented version starring the famous Harry Callahan would be nothing short of amazing.  

Though, knowing studios these days, I have no hope of it ever actually happening, as they would never be able to properly capture the political incorrectness and would likely have to pair Harry with some minority, oppressed woman that always does the job better than him and puts him in his place as a racist bigot all the time and lecturing the player on a constant basis to push "the message". On a related note, can you imagine how cool a Death Wish video game would be, if someone could get it right? To quote Harry himself, "Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot."

Anyways, there was never an official gameplay trailer released, but a teaser trailer with assets planned to be used in the game was created for the 2006 E3 show that you can watch below. The really sad bit is that it still completely sells me 110% on the concept, despite the visuals being pretty dated nowadays.