The Spooky Story of Zoiks!: The Canceled Hanna-Barbera Crossover Game

 Over the years, many games have been created based on the works of Hanna-Barbera. From Flintstones to Jetsons, from Wacky Races to Scooby-Doo, there have been plenty of video games based on the characters, as poor quality as many may have been. However, while the individual franchises have seen several games based on them, few exist that cross the characters over. That's where the subject of today's piece, Zoiks!, comes in. And no, that isn't a misspelling of Shaggy's classic catchphrase, that was the actual title of the game. 

Announced at some point in 1997, this game would have been set in the point-and-click adventure genre, and featured a whole host of classic Hanna-Barbera characters coming together to stop Dick Dastardly from taking all of the sounds in the world. Sound would've actually played a big role in the game. Specific sounds could have different effects on certain characters and objects. The title was also set to feature voice acting, with all of the characters being voiced by their respective actors at that time. Ocean Software was developing the game, having previously worked on the video game adaptation of The Flintstones feature film, and Infogrames would publish it for the PC, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn. They would later publish a Wacky Races title in 2000.

So, what went wrong? From the sound of things, everything was progressing well. A short trailer, which you can view below, was even commissioned, and by the sound of it, all of the voice acting for the game had been done as well. Perhaps it was a case of the wrong game at the wrong time? As I mentioned prior, the game was to be released on the original PlayStation, the Saturn, and the PC. The PlayStation One had a notoriously hard stance against 2D, sprite-based video games, so it's possible Sony rejected the game out of a belief that it didn't fit their library. At the same time, the Saturn console was performing horrendously outside of Japan, so I imagine it wouldn't have been worth it to release the game on the system. While that answers why the game didn't appear on consoles, what about the PC version? If there's any platform the game could have thrived, it's the PC, especially considering the fact that it was a point-and-click game. In the end, your guess is as good as mine. Whatever the reason was, the game never saw the light of day, and little media from it has ever been made public.

That being said, some press was done for this title before it was canned. An article about the game appeared in an issue of the video game magazine Edge, and there was the aforementioned promotional video for the game. If you'd like to read that article and learn a little bit more about Zoiks!, I suggest checking out the website Unseen64. They were a great help in putting this post together, and their site in general is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in canceled video games.