When rummaging around some files, we stumbled across a series of mugshots. Each came with a sheet of lined paper covered in time-faded unflattering scribbles. It was immediately obvious that these were drafts of playable characters; ones which were scrapped for being ridiculous or because there were issues with the actor.

In this chapter we’re going to look at some of these characters and try to figure out what happened.

First up is Dan Ostrich the genius hacker who had an “Uberchip” installed in his brain by the nasty megacorp Chipmunk. We can’t find any information on what an Uberchip is so we’re guessing that it’s better than an average monkey chip as well something to do with that fantastic hat.

Dan was a tour guide at the Cyberia Zoo purely because of his lifelong love of ostriches (there’s no explanation as to why, of all possibilities, he loved ostriches). He was also going to be a rival of Good Boy Ray and may have even played an important role in Scotch Mike’s alliance.

It’s not difficult to guess why Dan Ostrich was chucked onto the rubbish heap. However, your hunch–like ours–would be wrong. The Give Me Head team scrapped Dan because two days later the fella in the above photograph landed in the slammer after losing an Operation Wolf competition at a nearby arcade, scrapping with the winner and two members of staff.

He was sentenced to 90 days in jail where he converted to a doomsday cult.

Comrade Turner was going to be a member of the Cyberian Underground Insurgent Network Terrorists (CUINT). His role was Command Sergeant Major of the Megabyte Brigade.

Turner was going to be a neutral member of the CUINT favouring neither Ralph Nasty nor Keith. Rather he had devoted the previous year of his life drafting up a 300,000 word treaty, hoping to find a way for both factions to work alongside each other so that revolutionary activity could continue.

You may recall that the CUINT had fewer members than a high school baseball team and so revolutionary activity was vurtually nonexistent. However, Turner wasn’t scrapped for this reason.

The reason this character was scrapped is because the above actor–Nigel Bellamy–had told CEO Cassidy and Ryba during his interview that he was both vegetarian and teetotal.

“You eat pizza though, yeah?” Cassidy asked.

“So long as it don’t have no carcass in it.”

“Sure thing. Do you need any other special equipment or anything?”

“For being vegetarian?”

“Yes.”

“It ain’t a disability, sir.”

The next day, they told Nigel he was successful and invited him back for a photo shoot. Shortly afterwards he went on his merry way, looking forward to a new career in acting.

But no sooner had he left and Cassidy lit up a cigar.

“You know what, Charlie?”

“What?”

“Fuck vegetarians and fuck square head teetotallers. And fuck that horrible bitch at Channel 5 who told me to call again when I have a pilot.”

“So you don’t like vegetarians?” Cassidy looked at Ryba as if he’d just snorted a fart. “I’ll go make the call.”

And just like that, Comrade Turner was exterminated.

Pooch was scrapped after his photo shoot because they didn’t want “another shit can” like Boriz on their hands.

We fully support this decision.

Orville (real name Clifford Gray) was going to be a back alley surgeon offering a range of black market augmentation operations. These included a voice box modulation chip which comes with several voice changing abilities such as sounding “super sexy time” when speed dating. With enough Candy Coins you can also get a “nazal lazer” implant which allows you to point at anything you want within a five metre radius.

We think that Orville would’ve been a hilarious edition and we’re surprised that he wasn’t used when the likes of Dot was. So what the hell happened?

When Clifford finished his photo shoot the next day, he was ecstatic about being part of such a cutting edge project as Cyberia.

We couldn’t find much on Clifford in the notes so we delved a little deeper inside a digital newspaper archive. Turns out that during his stroll home, he was abducted by some thugs and chucked into the boot of their car. A couple of hours later the thugs dumped Clifford outside of a bank entranceway and used him as a human time bomb as to slow the police down.

It worked, but the bomb squad couldn’t defuse the complicated explosive device strapped to his midriff and so live on some news channel, half of the Give Me Head team watched him go bang! like a big tub of pink blancmange.

“I hope that isn’t some kind of premonition,” Cassidy whispered to Ryba while everyone else gasped in horror.

Ryba didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything. But deep down he had his suspicions.

Willy was going to be the manager and trainer of everyone’s favourite poke jitsu master Joey Knuckles thus becoming part of Scotch Mike’s inner circle. He was also a pro-scrapper until his career abruptly ended during his final match at the Screamer Arena against a fatty called Walrus. Walrus chopped Leif’s leg off with an axe that’d been thrown into the ring only to then get bludgeoned to death by the same leg before Leif collapsed from all the blood loss.

In real life, the actor who played Willy (Leif Aberg) was also missing a leg. He had served during the latter months of the Vietnam War; when fighting conditions were particularly brutal. One day he was blown up by a grenade along with three of his bunker buddies. He was the only one to survive but was a changed man.

During the photo shoot somebody thought it was a good idea to play 19 by Paul Hardcastle on the cassette player. Almost immediately Leif stood up and flipped a table while pushing the nearest person over, telling them to take cover.

He picked up a tripod and held it like a machine gun, yelping, “Die, you mother fuckers! Die! Die! Die!”

He then picked up a camera and held it to his ear. “Meeeeeeeedic!“

By this point everyone had dashed out of the room and locked the door. Meanwhile Leif kept diving around, shooting at invisible enemies.

“I will kill all of you this time! Especially you, Uncle fucking Ho!”

Leif continued like this until police and medics turned up and, after a two hour stand off, carted him away.

These are some of the scrapped characters we’ve found to date. However, we reckon that there might be more lurking about so check back here for updates.

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