Most interviews with game developers are stuffed with predictable hype about how wonderful everything in their game will be. It's pre-release time. A season for optimism! Here's something different—something brutal yet refreshing...
...from Mark Pacini, former game director of the incredible Metroid Prime games. His studio's now making a side-scrolling Metroid-style Batman game for the 3DS and Vita for release this fall.
This is from a chat between an editor at Game Informer and Pacini regarding Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate, the first original game from Pacini's five-year-old studio Armature, which is led by three former creative leads of Nintendo's Metroid Prime games.
Even though you don’t want to be seen as the ex-Metroid Prime guys, fans are going to be excited when they know ex-Metroid Prime guys are going to be making a Super Metroid-style game.
I hope so. I hope we don’t disappoint them. That’s always my fear, because I think everything we do sucks. But that’s just me because I thought all the Prime games suck. At the end of the day all I see are all the bad things. Prime 2 was a blur to me. It was so quick, it was so fast. That thing just went out the door and it was a very divisive game. People either liked it or thought it sucked, and I can completely agree because I couldn’t tell you what that game was because it happened so quickly. Prime 1 was the best designed game. Prime 3 I feel is the most fun one to play. Prime 2 is divisive. You either like it or you don’t. That’s kind of the way I look at it.
It is the same thing here with the Arkham game. All I see at this point, because we are knee deep, we’re in the woods right now in development, and all I see is all the crap that’s wrong with it. In my gut I feel like, yeah, it’s going to be cool. I’m excited for it. But at the same time, I hope we don’t disappoint people and I hope that they like it. We’re trying our hardest. I would like to play a game like this, so hopefully everyone else will, too.
If I might chime in... Metroid Prime 2 was fantastic. Especially that level in that high-tech city. Oh, and that last visor! Yeah, that didn't suck. Here's to future Armature games "sucking" just as bad as the Metroid Primes!
And here's to Mark Pacini's brand of refreshing frankness when doing interviews about gaming. That he admits things aren't always rosy makes these kinds of conversations—and the games his studio is working on—all the more interesting.
Batman Meets Metroid In Arkham Origins Blackgate [Game Informer]
Maker of 3 of the Best Games Ever: 'I think everything we do sucks'