{"id":45456,"date":"2018-09-07T00:18:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T00:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/325992"},"modified":"2018-09-07T00:18:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T00:18:00","slug":"devs-recount-the-making-of-golden-axe-beast-rider-a-crunch-ridden-15m-flop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/09\/07\/devs-recount-the-making-of-golden-axe-beast-rider-a-crunch-ridden-15m-flop\/","title":{"rendered":"Devs recount the making of Golden Axe: Beast Rider, a crunch-ridden $15M flop"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Unfortunately, [Golden Axe] was a bit shit.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– Game developer Belinda Heywood, reflecting on her work as a producer on 2008’s <\/em>Golden Axe: Beast Rider.<\/em><\/p>\n

Back in 2008 Sega and the now-defunct game studio\u00a0Secret Level released\u00a0Golden Axe: Beast Rider,\u00a0<\/em>an attempt to revive\u00a0the\u00a0Golden Axe\u00a0<\/em>franchise (in 3D!)\u00a0that earned a lukewarm reception from both critics and customers.<\/p>\n

Now, nearly a decade later, the folks at Variety have published an interesting feature<\/a> about the game’s\u00a0~$15 million development which includes a lot of eye-opening input from some of the original dev team.<\/p>\n

It’s an intriguing read, even if you feel like you’ve heard\u00a0this tale a few times before: ambitious studio pitches an ambitious project, overscopes, then desperately chops a bunch of stuff out and\u00a0pours in loads of overtime\u00a0in an attempt to make something playable in time to ship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What really stands out is how much time the devs\u00a0remember spending in crunch: multiple folks told Variety they remember\u00a0working overtime seven days a week for months on end, to the point that they would take a break on weekend evenings to go out and party, then come back to the office to sleep it off and continue working.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019d work from 10 to 7. Then we\u2019d go out, and drink, then come back and work some more,” said\u00a0producer Belinda Heywood.\u00a0“We did it for six months. Everybody did. And Saturday and Sunday as well, seven days a week.”<\/p>\n

Deeply troubled, the project reportedly saw a lot of turnover, and Variety’s sources paint a picture of a studio that fostered both enduring camaraderie and progress-killing disputes over seemingly trivial matters like who gets to write the shaders. With less than a year before it was scheduled to release, Dedan Anderson signed on as the new lead designer and was tasked with bringing it all together into a shippable product.<\/p>\n

“That was a firefighting exercise,” he told Variety. “There was a lot of crunches. I blocked that out. That was my last crunch project. That took the crunch out of me. I\u2019m not doing crunches anymore.”<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, crunching didn’t make the game good. However, in an effort to end on an upbeat note Variety’s feature helps shed more\u00a0light on why teams crunch, and what keeps them going: a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork in solving huge problems.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s my best game,” said art director Matthew Butler. “Not in the way of gameplay or anything like that, but just in the team, the situation. The whole team was great. I think I had one of the best times I\u2019ve ever had creating anything. We weren\u2019t satisfied with what we did, but we had the most fun, or I did.”<\/p>\n

“The last 13 months were some of the most challenging crunch I\u2019ve ever experienced in my over 10 years in the games industry,\u201d added\u00a0Boccieri. \u201cI was one of the people that made it a point I needed to leave the office from time to time, but there was a team of at least 20 to 30 core staff that were some of the most dedicated people I\u2019ve ever worked with who brought the game over the line.”<\/p>\n

In the end, a game envisioned as what we might now call an open-world RPG replete with multiplayer and a cast of playable character wound up being a pretty linear single-player game starring a scantily-clad woman. The rest of Variety’s story about how that happened<\/a> is well worth reading in full, as is Gamasutra’s extract of the\u00a0Beast Rider\u00a0<\/em>postmortem<\/a> published in a 2009 issue of (the also now-defunct)\u00a0Game Developer Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Unfortunately, [Golden Axe] was a bit shit.” – Game developer Belinda Heywood, reflecting on her work as a producer on 2008’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider. Back in 2008 Sega and the now-defunct game studio\u00a0Secret Level released\u00a0Golden Axe: Beast Rider,\u00a0an attempt to revive\u00a0the\u00a0Golden Axe\u00a0franchise (in 3D!)\u00a0that earned a lukewarm reception from both critics and customers. Now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}