For the past few weeks, BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has been dusting off some long-buried Revolver concept art.

Last November, we got a glimpse of the next "Mass Effect" illustrated by BioWare's 25th anniversary artbook. However, that artbook contained the last image of Revolver, a near-future urban RPG that was never officially announced until it was cancelled in the late 2000s. Now, Rhodes has released a comic-like concept piece he wrote for the game on Instagram.

"Originally created as a sequel to 'Jade Empire,' 'Revolver' evolved and changed direction several times during development," Rhodes explained. The details were recently revealed in the book "BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development." In honor of this, I went through the archives and blew the dust off 15 years of my favorite work from that project.

Described as a loose follow-up to Jade Empire, Revolver is a cyberpunk world of demonic businessmen and leather-clad gangsters chopping up metrocopters, popping out of Half-Life 2 in a variety of styles, such as smorgasbord.

According to Eurogamer, Revolver was reportedly in development between 2005 and 2008. The game featured a dense urban sandbox for players to parkour through, and a non-linear narrative in which characters would appear organically throughout the city. Unfortunately, the project was eventually cancelled in time for the launch of Dragon Age Origins: as far as BioWare is concerned, the rest is history.

The past decade at BioWare has been dominated by Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and it is interesting to see a world where the studio could have steered in a completely different direction. Nevertheless, the developer's last new attempt led to the ill-fated Anthem, and who knows what would have happened to Revolver, but it's a good thing that the studio is still working on a new project.

There is plenty more art on Rhodes' Artstation and Instagram, and BioWare is slowly releasing more information about "Dragon Age 4," including some fascinating new concept art earlier this month.