It's hard for me to see videogames as labors of love.
The illusion that our favorite worlds were crafted by small, passionate teams working on their own terms and pushing themselves to tell the stories they wanted to was quickly (and devastatingly) shattered the second we started getting word of inhuman crunch times, unjustified layoffs, and general harassment. The games industry, it seemed like, was just another factory, hellbent on mass-producing the same thing over and over, completely disregarding its human backbone. Whoever these nameless developers were, they didn't matter -- they were entirely replaceable and added nothing of value to the discussion.
And maybe it's precisely because I have long adopted this bitter, bloody view of the whole thing that I was actually taken aback by the story I'm about to tell you... one I have actually hinted at since the very beginning of my membership on this site, but that I wasn't quite ready (or able) to deliver in full until now: this is the story of the extremely troubled development of Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth, the one game whose backstory restored my faith in the whole process through the selfless actions used to make it.
It's 1999 and a young designer by the name of Andrew Brazier is enjoying a quiet evening on the internet, chatting away on a UseNet group where fans of his new project are eagerly pitching ideas for him to use. This is a tremendously enjoyable thing, and he's having a ton of fun just listening to these people as they grind their keyboards to dust, dreaming that one of their ideas may make it on to a game they have been waiting for since it was first announced a couple of months back. This, right here, seems like the next step, the true evolution of the entertainment industry: instant feedback by future players/readers/listeners as the tales they want to experience are being crafted alongside them.
Actually the most fitting start to our tale of magic and horror.
By the time the chat window goes quiet, Andrew has a folder full of ideas to pitch to his bosses, and he knows they will listen.
Mike and Tricia Woodroffe are not your typical CEOs of a successful game company. In fact, they are likely the last thing you'd expect to see upon walking into a business meeting: a husband-and-wife duo who developed a passion for the craft during the very dawn of the videogame age, they take pride on doing whatever they can to present eager gamers with stories worth telling, and they aren't afraid to fail, understanding that failure is the greatest learning experience.
This mindset is what allowed them to pick up the pieces after trying their hands at different ideas, funding and managing several small studios until they could just get it right... and that's exactly what happened when they struck gold on their third try, developing the Simon the Sorcerer series and carving a name for themselves on a genre already dominated by Sierra and LucasArts.
Simon the Sorcerer became Mike and Tricia's most valuable asset and effectively what allowed them to allocate enough capital to fund a new studio: HeadFist Productions, whose first title (rather unsurprisingly) was Simon the Sorcerer 3D, a game which didn't blow anyone away and that looked a little lonely on a landscape that was slowly moving away from the graphic adventure genre, but that still managed to bring in enough cash and prestige to allow them to pursue a long-held dream: working on a game based on the nightmare worlds imagined by HP Lovecraft.
And Lovecraftian it got.
Whatever else I may end up saying about the game, they really did care about its atmosphere. This is properly unsettling.
Dark Corners Of The Earth wasn't the result of overconfidence on the part of the developers (or the dynamic duo tasking them with making it happen), but the natural consequence of more than two decades of experience in the videogame market, a sort of earned calm that allowed them to take risks a younger or more inexperienced core wouldn't dare to.
What the Woodroffe couple and their brave team of devs had in mind would have already been an enormous task for a far more seasoned studio thrice their size, but they had clear goals and knew how to make them happen. By the time they finally sat down with the finished design documents in hand, they had all agreed to go forward with a plan that would include area-based damage for our protagonist, fifteen weapons for us to use, a completely interactive, non-linear world that we could explore to our heart's content, a four-player Co-Op mode for us to enjoy with friends, a system which would allow us to suffer hallucinations (or even completely lose it) once we had absorbed enough of that trademark horror that Lovecraftian stories were all about, and many other things. But the thing that truly caught my eye upon reading it for the first time was the fact that this juggernaut was going to come out for PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox at the same time, effectively requiring separate development and publishing cycles.
It was madness, but a fitting kind of madness.
Of course, not all of these features survived the cold, sharp axe of reality: once the usual constraints (time, money, what consoles and PCs of the time could actually handle) became evident, lots of little details, features and mechanics were canned in order for them to deliver on the bulk of their promises.
One of the first things to go was the (started) PS2 version, which was cancelled so the team could focus their resources on developing the compatible PC and Xbox versions side-by-side, which would become such a humongous act of unintended sorcery that it wouldn't have been out of place in one of the Simon games.
Considering this game ended up being downgraded to fit on the original Xbox, it boasts some truly delightful lightning effects.
By the time E3 2001 rolled around, HeadFist Productions proudly announced that "around 70%" of the game had been completed, which had fans openly cheering. This was a project that many of these people had eagerly followed since the very beginning, and now they had just been told that the ideas they had imagined years ago were within reach and almost ready to be experienced. It couldn't get any better than that.
Unfortunately, that's where the problems started.
Following a steady progress, 2001 turned into 2004 in the blink of an eye after the whole thing was forced into an almost screeching halt, and then the bad news kept on coming: HeadFist Productions had to actually go looking for a publisher after confidence in the project reached an all-time low following three straight years of missed deadlines owed to a myriad of small but persistent technical hiccups. And when they finally found someone willing to give them a chance (in the form of FishTank Entertaiment), their savior was acquired by another company (JoWood), which immediately pulled out of the deal, leaving HeadFist to scramble to find someone else to get their game published... this resulted on them teaming up with Bethesda Softworks on an "eleventh hour" kind of deal that looked like the first strike of good luck the team had had in years.
What we gotta understand is that, unlike many developers, HeadFist wasn't drowning because nobody involved with the company had any idea what they were doing, but because they didn't want to sacrifice their creative vision more than it was absolutely necessary: this lead them to pull a lot of moves that were sound from a game-design perspective, but were akin to suicide for a studio working on borrowed time.
Moves like discarding the entire framework they had been working on, tossing aside the combination of the NDL NetImmerse graphics engine and the Havok physical engine and to write their own environment to replace them both, adding enormously to the already mounting costs they were facing and putting the game behind schedule once more when time was on such short supply that Bethesda may actually jump ship, leaving them partner-less again.
And shooting, they did.
To their credit, Bethesda stuck with them even as the whole thing started to look and feel very directionless, but that was just the tip of the iceberg, because HeadFist had actually started work on both a sequel to this unfinished title (!): Call Of Cthulhu: Destiny's End (far enough into development that a few screenshots were actually published, much to the public's general confusion) and Call Of Cthulhu: Beyond The Mountains Of Madness, which was (apparently) going to be a 2D point-n-click graphic adventure. Unsurprisingly, both projects were cancelled the second it looked like not even Dark Corners Of The Earth was going to make it out of its self-made development hell.
I really do find it funny that the game had a longer (but no less troubled) development cycle than Daikatana's, yet was still given a chance to prove its worth, unlike John Romero's tragic masterpiece (maybe because we like our "dark horse" stories, but probably because Romero had made way too many outrageous statements to cut him some slack)... whatever the case, Dark Corners Of The Earth came out on Xbox in 2005 and PC in 2006, arriving to almost universal critical acclaim and making it into many "best of" lists, despite a punishing difficulty and, shall we say, less-than-polished programming. This didn't translate to high sales, however, and the numbers the game finally pulled across both platforms didn't match what HeadFist and Bethesda had wanted. This was a beloved game that fans just got tired of waiting for, a tale as old as gaming itself.
However... I promised heart and a good story at the beginning of this article, and here's where they both lay: once the Xbox version was ready to be published, our heroes at HeadFist found themselves deep in the red -- the lengthy, nightmarish development having taken a massive toll on the company and its books, so they had to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to appease the eldritch gods they had tried to tame: they sold the rights to their beloved Simon the Sorcerer franchise to Silver Style Entertainment, a German company ready to buy at a huge discount when it was apparent that this was a do-or-die affair for the Woodroffes. But not even that was enough to save the company, and they found themselves forced to close the studio with the PC version half-unfinished and rotting on hard drives that no longer belonged to them.
I remember loving this opening fight so much. They really nailed something right from the start and never let go of that feeling.
I have never spoken to Mike and Tricia Woodroffe, but they must have been the best bosses around because their team did something so selfless that it almost doesn't seem real: knowing full-well that the studio had gone under and that they weren't going to be paid for their labor, the entire development crew kept returning, day after day, to the office to finish the PC version of the game even as their very tools were being taken away from them by annoyed liquidators and creditors tired of waiting on these little nerds who were, somehow, still showing up for work as if they had missed the memo. They had spent seven long years of their lives giving shape to this thing and weren't going to abandon it when the goal was within reach.
As you can probably imagine (given the circumstances), the end result wasn't pretty: a hastily put-together port/dump of the Xbox release that was tweaked just enough to work on computers of the time, but hardly taking advantage of them -- the manic upgrades that many players had subjected their systems to in order to enjoy mammoth offerings like Doom 3 had turned this brave little thing into a complete joke by system requirement standards, resulting on a game that could be enjoyed by the vast majority of the players that were already into gaming but that wasn't going to impress them any.
Furthermore, the game wasn't ported cleanly, resulting on many bugs that were still being discovered in the Xbox version carrying over to the PC, and many others being created as a result of switching systems without reworking the fine details and differences that existed between both machines, effectively adding a couple of entirely new problems and even a game-breaking glitch that made it impossible to play through the adventure until a fan-made patch was released years later.
It would be very easy to say that everyone involved messed up, that the Woodraffes shouldn't have pushed the game to be made the way it was, that JoWood should have honored the existing contract between HeadFist and FishTank; that the developers should have been given enough time to finish the game regardless of whatever else was going on... and, in a perfect world, that would all make sense, but this isn't a perfect world, and that's precisely why the noble actions of a couple of really involved developers who just cared about a project they had spent years working on matters to such a degree. Remember: these people were all out of a job and probably wondering how in the world they were going to pay the bills while still showing up to finish what they had started -- and that hasn't been forgotten or ignored by the gaming community, which continue to draw inspiration from their actions and work on the game to this day to get it as close as possible to what
this team had originally intended it to be. That's precious.
In a landscape in which people are being worked half to death and then cast to the wind the second they are no longer useful to their corporate overlords, stories like this one matter and SHOULD be told around digital "campfires" and shared gaming spaces to remind us of why we love this craft in the first place. Sometimes a buggy, unstable release that shouldn't even exist is all we really need to remind us that, at some point, it truly did matter. And it mattered so much that the whole thing could be started on a random chatroom and end on a studio whose power could be turned off at any second without neither of those things being the focus of the story.
And I don't know about you, but I really needed this reminder.
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