Prison Architect Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360 Announcement
by Mark » Wed Jan 20, 2016 4:13 pm
For those who don’t know, Introversion has had it’s ups and downs over the years. We were founded in 2001 and launched Uplink from the IV website. Sales were good enough for us to think that there was a future in it, but not really enough to even pay the founders a living wage. We worked to try to open up a new revenue stream by getting the game into the shops in the UK followed by the US.
We were partially successful, but ran out of money during our quest to make our second game - Darwinia. Similarly, our on-line sales from Darwinia weren’t brilliant and our (now global) retail partners didn’t add much to the slow drip of cash that trickled into the bank account each month.
Now Chris had always been responsible for making the games and I felt that my role was to take his work and commercialise it so that we could survive to make the next game. I felt that the creation of the original game concept was the hard part and taking it to new platforms would be an easy port - how wrong I was!
We’d originally scheduled 6 months to port Darwinia to the XBox 360, but it ended up taking 5 years. The reasons for this have already been heavily documented, but fundamentally it centered around our experience. The technical port was much harder than expected, but I was also very naive when it came to dealing with Microsoft and fully admit that there was a lot I should have done to push back against certain demands.
Darwinia+ (as it came to be known) ended up being a devastating project for “old” Introversion and along with Subversion stopped us dead in our tracks. And then things changed.
Both Chris and I had been entrenched in our relative positions about what we should / shouldn’t do for Introversion and our dogged arrogance and determination (which had served us well in the early days) had ultimately led to our demise. Somehow we were still pals and both of us were able to quickly move on and build a new strategy for the company. A humble bundle got us back on our feet and created the headspace to create a new video game.
Prison Architect is far and away our most successful game to date. By any metric: number of players, revenue, critical response, PA pretty much out performs everything that we have done before. In part that’s because it was a great concept, but more importantly (to me at least) it reflects “new” introversion where Chris and I have a lot more respect for each other’s roles and are much more considered and collaborative in our approach.
And so we arrive in March 2015. Prison Architect is storming it and I sit down to talk to Chris about a console version. His face drops to his hands and he shakes his head as the mental floodgates to all the pain and suffering endured during our previous console effort burst open spewing forth misery and heart-ache. But he listens.
I explain that abandoning a massive swathe of gamers because we cocked up last time was wrong. We needed to look at the root cause for our failure and try again. He looked me dead in the eye and said “I’m not doing it”. “Nor should you”, I replied - you need to get PA ready for launch. So I went out and found someone who could. Chris listed all the risks to the project and I asked a few developers to pitch their responses. Ultimately we found a developer from the north of the UK - Double 11 and got them under contract.
Within a week they had the first version of the build up and running and their head designer had mapped out the entire interface scheme and the changes required for a decent 10 foot experience and controller mapping. We had our first development meeting and on leaving Chris turned to me and said they’d done a better job on the interface then he could ever have achieved.
Both the D11 team and myself were over the moon with Chris’ response and work continued throughout 2015 with no drop in quality or performance. I felt that I had busted a ghost that had haunted Introversion for many years - the belief that it was not possible for Introversion games to successfully produce a fantastic port to the consoles.
Today marks the public announcement of Prison Architect for Xbox 360, Xbox One and PS4. The build is absolutely stunning, I’m so proud that we have afforded the opportunity for so many new gamers to play PA and I can’t wait to see what they think. In the haze of publicity and excitement that will follow over the next few months they’ll be a quiet little part of me bursting with pride that bygones were allowed to be bygones, hatchets were buried, wrongs were righted and Chris and I figured out how to work together again.
We were partially successful, but ran out of money during our quest to make our second game - Darwinia. Similarly, our on-line sales from Darwinia weren’t brilliant and our (now global) retail partners didn’t add much to the slow drip of cash that trickled into the bank account each month.
Now Chris had always been responsible for making the games and I felt that my role was to take his work and commercialise it so that we could survive to make the next game. I felt that the creation of the original game concept was the hard part and taking it to new platforms would be an easy port - how wrong I was!
We’d originally scheduled 6 months to port Darwinia to the XBox 360, but it ended up taking 5 years. The reasons for this have already been heavily documented, but fundamentally it centered around our experience. The technical port was much harder than expected, but I was also very naive when it came to dealing with Microsoft and fully admit that there was a lot I should have done to push back against certain demands.
Darwinia+ (as it came to be known) ended up being a devastating project for “old” Introversion and along with Subversion stopped us dead in our tracks. And then things changed.
Both Chris and I had been entrenched in our relative positions about what we should / shouldn’t do for Introversion and our dogged arrogance and determination (which had served us well in the early days) had ultimately led to our demise. Somehow we were still pals and both of us were able to quickly move on and build a new strategy for the company. A humble bundle got us back on our feet and created the headspace to create a new video game.
Prison Architect is far and away our most successful game to date. By any metric: number of players, revenue, critical response, PA pretty much out performs everything that we have done before. In part that’s because it was a great concept, but more importantly (to me at least) it reflects “new” introversion where Chris and I have a lot more respect for each other’s roles and are much more considered and collaborative in our approach.
And so we arrive in March 2015. Prison Architect is storming it and I sit down to talk to Chris about a console version. His face drops to his hands and he shakes his head as the mental floodgates to all the pain and suffering endured during our previous console effort burst open spewing forth misery and heart-ache. But he listens.
I explain that abandoning a massive swathe of gamers because we cocked up last time was wrong. We needed to look at the root cause for our failure and try again. He looked me dead in the eye and said “I’m not doing it”. “Nor should you”, I replied - you need to get PA ready for launch. So I went out and found someone who could. Chris listed all the risks to the project and I asked a few developers to pitch their responses. Ultimately we found a developer from the north of the UK - Double 11 and got them under contract.
Within a week they had the first version of the build up and running and their head designer had mapped out the entire interface scheme and the changes required for a decent 10 foot experience and controller mapping. We had our first development meeting and on leaving Chris turned to me and said they’d done a better job on the interface then he could ever have achieved.
Both the D11 team and myself were over the moon with Chris’ response and work continued throughout 2015 with no drop in quality or performance. I felt that I had busted a ghost that had haunted Introversion for many years - the belief that it was not possible for Introversion games to successfully produce a fantastic port to the consoles.
Today marks the public announcement of Prison Architect for Xbox 360, Xbox One and PS4. The build is absolutely stunning, I’m so proud that we have afforded the opportunity for so many new gamers to play PA and I can’t wait to see what they think. In the haze of publicity and excitement that will follow over the next few months they’ll be a quiet little part of me bursting with pride that bygones were allowed to be bygones, hatchets were buried, wrongs were righted and Chris and I figured out how to work together again.
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Mark - Introversion Staff
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- Posts: 98
- Joined: Wed May 30, 2001 1:24 am
