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Archive On Her Story's 5th birthday, Sam Barlow looks back at his breakout game—and talks about what's next at PC Gamer (by Andy Kelly)

  • June 24, 2020
  • By Andy Kelly, Sam Barlow, and PC Gamer

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... "But the big thing that precipitated Her Story was spending three years as the writer and director of a Legacy of Kain reboot. A very ambitious AAA game that was essentially Zelda, but if HBO made it. This utterly failed to work, because people wanted the game to be like Uncharted. They told us they wanted a dark, intelligent single-player game, but we'd get feedback from greenlight meetings (that we were ourselves not attending) and we'd be reading the subtext, thinking: are you sure that's what you want? Then they started talking about multiplayer and DLC."

"Square Enix was juggling some amazing IP. Hitman, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex. But none of them had been huge commercially. Even a huge phenomenon like Tomb Raider. And so after three years, the Legacy of Kain game was cancelled. After that, I spent a year, at the same company, pitching and desperately trying to figure out how to get a videogame made. They were really focused on mobile and free to play. Free to play was blowing up, so why would they spend $50 million on a single-player game? And so we shifted to pitching smaller, story-driven things, around the time these kinds of cool, digital-only games were becoming popular on XBLA. But the economics of it never made sense, which was frustrating."

...

"I was really interested in making character-driven, narrative-focused games, and the kinds of things I wanted to do meant some element of performance. Gone Home was created from the concept of telling a story if you can't have lots of characters and cinematics. Then games like Tacoma and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture used holograms and ghosts. But this wouldn't work for me. For the stories I wanted to tell, I would have needed millions of dollars for motion capture. I spent a year on Legacy of Kain directing performance capture with a really cool cast, so I knew how that worked and the costs and everything." ...

―Andy Kelly[1]

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