Prior to God of War PS4 going into active development, Sony Santa Monica was working on a brand new IP. Codenamed “Internal-7,” the game was a sci-fi PS4 exclusive. However, the game never saw the light of day. Sony Santa Monica’s new IP was canceled back in 2017 which led to multiple developers losing their job.
The mystery project just wasn’t coming together. The remaining team, consisting of 110 developers was merged with the team of developers working on God of War PS4. Years of work was canceled but the work began on God of War PS4.
After two years of the game’s cancelation, Sony Santa Monica has officially shared art from the canceled new IP. Not only art but a tiny look into gameplay which doesn’t really give anything away but still, we can see what it would have looked like. (Skip to 8.59)
According to Mehdi Yssf, gameplay animation lead on Internal-7, the game feature gunplay and they were going to do something completely different. Internal-7 was in pre-production for roughly 37 months and after that, they were going to be helped by God of War Ascension team. At the 9.31 mark in the video, we can see one of the developers working on a Halo-like Warthog. You can see a playable character running around the Warthog indicating that the Warthog section wasn’t a scripted section of the game.
In an emotional statement, Head of Sony Santa Monica Shanon Studstill said that Internal-7 “is a dream that died.” Sony Santa Monica team was devasted by the cancelation of this new IP.
However, the critical and commercial success of God of War might have washed away the devastating memory of Internal-7.
You can check out the entire Raising Kratos documentary to know more about the creation of God of War reboot and Internal-7.
At some point, we will see Sony Santa Monica work on another new IP and hopefully, this time it will come together.
