Phil Harrison hardly had time to settle into his highly-publicized new role as president of Infogrames before being shuttled across the Atlantic to head up a press junket for Eden Studios' upcoming Alone in the Dark.
Questions abound regarding Harrison's plans for Infogrames and subsidiary Atari - he has indicated he plans to focus more on online and social gaming, areas he was known to champion (sometimes with resistance) during his long tenure at Sony Computer Entertainment.
Soon he will be launching Alone in the Dark, an update to the classic survival series that has been in the works for some four years at Eden. The high-budget title that hopes to bridge some of the gaps between games and passive serialized entertainment like television - it is sold all on one disc, but the game is split up into episodes, even allowing users to skip ahead to episodes they have not yet reached. It is set to ship this June for PC and Xbox 360, alongside Wii and PS2 versions from Hydravision entertainment; a PS3 version is expected this fall.
Gamasutra sat down with Harrison during the recent event - although he was largely unwilling to stray off the topic of the headlining game, as we were reminded numerous times by multiple PR folk. Still, he did touch on some of his longer-term plans for Atari, and indicated that Alone in the Dark is likely to represent one of the publisher's last forays into high-budget, single-player hardcore gaming.
Alone in the Dark developer Pieces Interactive has been hit with layoffs a month after its release, as per the latest information.
That genuinely, genuinely sucks. The reboot has clear flaws, but it really felt like a solid first step for this team to receive *greater* investment.
That's standard. Teams are together for a Project, after its done some..and sometimes most devs are fired until the next Project is in the works and people are needed again. Only the core members stay in the time between the hot phase of the game development.
What’s annoying is people don’t understand how contractors work, either. All of this is uninformed knee-jerk reactions without any understanding of how employment works in this industry. There are key developers and staff that stay with a studio/publisher, but often times it’s a hire per project and then seeking new employment for a project. That’s how it’s always been…
That's a fair point too. I would say that in light of its tepid critical/commercial response and ongoing mass layoffs across the industry I think it's understandable for fans to worry about the longer-term implications. We'll see how it plays out in the future.
VGChartz's Lee Mehr: "In one sense, it feels strange to even think Pieces Interactive had big shoes to fill with this series' legacy. Given what's come before, did it really? And yet, even when considering the last two flops over a two-decade span, there's still something about Alone in the Dark emblazoned on a title screen that carries a sense of revered history. In that respect, perhaps this reboot's best accomplishment is in honoring that spirit through its inventive world. It's also fair to emphasize knocks against its survival-horror design, some puzzle-solving, and so on; it certainly won't be considered a trendsetter like the 1992 classic. Still, the amount of goodwill wedded to its brighter qualities makes for something that dawdles the line between unfortunately-flawed and impressively-enticing."
The new Alone in the Dark remake doesn't do anything especially noteworthy, but that doesn't mean it's bad. It's just... cromulent.
PS3 games are being delayed again. What a shocker!