Every cancelled game has a story, but few have a plot twist quite like this one. In August 2016, word spread that Infinity — a tactical role-playing game built for the Game Boy Color at the turn of the century and abandoned when its publisher walked away — was suddenly back from the dead. The original version of this article, published that month, reported that the game was “nearing completion” and heading for an official release. That was not quite what had happened, and honesty requires us to say so plainly before telling the rest of the story: what actually arrived in August 2016 was not a finished game approaching the shops, but the opposite — the developers giving their unfinished work away. Understanding that difference is the key to the whole saga, because the giveaway is precisely what saved the game in the end.
A Big RPG for a Small Machine
Infinity was created by Affinix Software, a small independent team working between 1999 and 2001, right at the end of the Game Boy Color’s time in the shops. Where most developers were winding down for Nintendo’s little colour handheld, Affinix aimed absurdly high. Their game was a full-scale tactical RPG: a war story about an ancient, nameless evil stirring beneath the earth, two rival nations being armed against each other by a shadowy figure, and a disgraced knight caught between his own grief and the machinery of hate. Around that plot they built a battle system with genuine tactical depth, including the option to switch at any time between “Wait” and “Action” battle modes at four different speeds, a script running to more than 3,000 lines of dialogue and over 20,000 words — longer, as the team liked to point out, than the script of Final Fantasy II — and a world planned to hold more than fifty explorable areas and over a hundred items.
The Game Boy Color, in Atomic Purple. Infinity was designed to squeeze every drop from this modest hardware. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons.
This was not vapourware. The game was far enough along to be shown at E3 in 2001, and it had a publisher: Crave Entertainment was set to release it. By Affinix’s own account the work was roughly ninety per cent complete. Then the ground moved. Nintendo launched the Game Boy Advance in 2001, retailers and players pivoted to the new machine almost overnight, and after months of negotiation Crave declined to publish a major Game Boy Color release into a market that had stopped wanting them. Affinix, a small studio built around this one ambitious project, came apart soon afterwards, and in 2002 Infinity was formally cancelled. It joined the saddest shelf in gaming: the nearly finished games that almost nobody would ever play.
What Really Happened in 2016
Here is the part our original post got wrong, and it matters. In August 2016 — the preview build is dated 13 August — former members of Affinix briefly reformed for an act of preservation rather than commerce. They took the game largely as it had stood when development stopped in 2001, applied some light polishing in the form of bug fixes, restored assets and corrected text, and released it publicly and free of charge, together with the source code, so that anyone could study it or even attempt to finish it. To keep players from wandering into the unfinished sections, the preview was deliberately configured to end around a quarter of the way through the story. A 31-song soundtrack by composers Haché and Valente was released alongside it.
So no official release was imminent in 2016, and no completion was near. What the moment actually represented was arguably more interesting: a development team deciding that a decade and a half in a drawer was enough, and handing their life’s work to the public before it could be lost for good. Retro fans responded exactly as the team must have hoped, celebrating Infinity as one of the last great Game Boy Color projects — and, crucially, some of the people watching would turn out to have the means to do something about it.
The Game Boy Advance: the machine whose 2001 arrival made Infinity commercially impossible the first time around. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons.
Hindsight: The Ending Nobody Predicted
Everything from this point on is hindsight — none of it was known when this article first appeared, and we label it as such because the original post’s confident tone shows how easily “someday” gets misreported as “soon.”
The rescue began quietly. Retro Modding, a Canadian company built around replacement parts and modifications for classic handhelds, first heard about Infinity in 2017 and, as the firm grew, returned to the idea of finishing it in earnest in late 2018. After long discussions, the Affinix veterans entrusted the project to them. A publishing subsidiary, Incube8 Games, was set up in 2021 to carry the revival, with a team mixing original Affinix staff and new developers. On 18 August 2021, twenty years after the cancellation, a Kickstarter campaign opened to fund the completion and a proper physical cartridge release. It asked for a modest goal and received a landslide: 3,458 backers pledged CA$370,823. Stretch goals followed, including an enhanced Nintendo Switch version — and, at the hundred-thousand-dollar mark, new music from Yuzo Koshiro, the legendary composer of Streets of Rage, contributing to a Game Boy project for the first time in his career.
Finishing a stranger’s unfinished game turned out to be harder than funding it. The initial projections pointed at 2022; the years slipped by with demos shared to backers and long silences that tested the community’s faith. But the work was real. The completed Infinity restored and polished the original content, refined the graphics and gameplay, and added new features, including an extra difficulty mode unlocked on Game Boy Advance hardware. The finished game offers five playable characters — Conor, Ryan, Elya, Roland and Victor — more than thirty explorable areas, over a hundred items, fifteen bosses and around fifteen hours of play: a little leaner than the fifty-area, twenty-hour epic promised in 2001, but a complete, coherent RPG rather than a museum piece. Pre-orders for the general public opened at the end of September 2025, in digital, standard boxed and collector’s editions, with the release set for 22 December 2025 — twenty-four years after the game was first meant to ship.
The Moral of Infinity
There is a pleasing symmetry to how this ended. Affinix’s 2016 decision to release their unfinished game and its source code looked, from the outside, like an epitaph — and our original article misread it as a launch announcement. In truth it was an invitation, and it worked exactly as preservationists always hope such gestures will: the game stayed visible, stayed talked about, and eventually found the people willing to spend four years and a crowdfunding fortune finishing it. Infinity spent two decades as one of gaming’s great what-ifs. Thanks to a giveaway that was never a release, it does not have to be one any more.
Editorial note: Infinity is covered here as a matter of gaming history. In line with our policy, we do not link to game downloads; the finished edition is sold through its publisher’s own channels.