Capitol Punishment

Capitol Punishment was a Al Lowe & Josh Mandel political satire game first announced in Sierra Interaction, Fall 1994 issue, and its cancellation in the following issue (Winter, 1994). It had a projected release date of November 1994, just in time for the elections.

Background
It was designed to be equal opportunity offending, there were levels for Republicans, levels for Democrats, even levels for independents. Al Lowe comments there is even a dog.

One of the first levels was Bill and Hillary's White Water Adventures, in which Hillary paddled the raft, while Bill waved to his fans.

Sierra and its employees have given a number of reasons for why it was cancelled. Sierra's official response was "After some major positive (and negative response) to Capitol Punishment, the decision was made to shelve Al Lowe's political satire until tempers cool off from the elections."

But apparently there were other issues as well, including that the SCI engine couldn't handle the arcade sequences that comprised the game: "Capitol Punishment was canceled just weeks before it was due to be released, because it played HORRIBLY. SCI was completely incapable of handling the various extended arcade sequences that comprised the game. It was not even close to being ship-worthy and the team was just about out of time."

Apparently, according to Al Lowe, it actually got cancelled because the interpreter they were using (not SCI - it was one designed by an employee in their spare time for side scrolling games) couldn’t handle the game they had programmed and so they scrapped it.

In a 1997 interview, according to Al:
 * "It got far enough along for me to realize it was a better premise than game! There were some clever ideas in it, but at the time, it was a new game engine that ran beautiful with a test-size set of data. But when we actually loaded in enough characters, objects, graphics, sounds, etc to make a game...it bogged down terribly. Of course, with today's Pentium-requirements it would run just fine. Hey! Maybe...just maybe...."