Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (cancelled) (November, 1994)

Taito wanted to port the SNES RPG to the Genesis for the holiday rush, in the hopes that sales of Lufia would bolster their profits and allow them to push several other projects out the door with the windfall. This backfired spectacularly when the initial studio Taito entrusted with the task promised Taito that they could complete the project in-house, but then immediately sub-contracted the project to a small third-party studio. This smaller studio had virtually no communication with the original Japanese developers at Neverland Software, thus progress was too slow to meet benchmarks. The project came back in-house, but despite having the Japanese SNES source code, the entirely different hardware of the Genesis made a direct port problematic. They brought in a dev with tons of experience in Genesis development, but by now the deadline was six months out, which was impossible given the resources at their disposal. The plug was pulled on the project, and since Taito American had put all their eggs in Lufia's basket, this spelled disaster for them financially, and the studio shut down a few months later in 1995.