Posted by Bob Mackey
Last year's announcement of a new Splatterhouse game was unexpected, but exciting; the revival even got an EGM cover, for crying out loud. But recent developments for the slightly-obscure franchise have been less than promising; with developer bottleRocket losing custody of the game to Namco-Bandai due to a "performance issue" claimed by the developer, the fate of Splatterhouse isn't looking so good. With such a vague explanation of why the game was literally ripped from bottleRocket's hands, it's hard to remain optimistic about the future of the Friday the 13th-inspired brawler.
But it may be a little misguided to blame bottleRocket for the state of Splatterhouse; a recent statement from the developer given to the fine people at GamaSutra indicates that Namco's issues with their work on Splatterhouse have been greatly exaggerated--or just plain made up:
"Game development contracts are put in place to protect the publisher and their interests. Within these contracts are a series of defined game development objectives and goals called milestones. If a developer is under performing they tend to fail these milestones and have varying degrees of accountability placed upon them.
Splatterhouse had been in development for over eighteen months and up to having the title taken away from us we had not missed any contractually defined milestones. So either there were no performance issues during that timeframe or Namco’s management of the title was inept."
So, what exactly was Namco's problem with this in-development game? Creative differences over artistic direction? Or was the Splatterhouse revival just a bad idea to begin with? Given bottleRocket's track record, it's hard to see how they'd screw this up.
Related Links:
Klonoa: Careful, Namco. You Tread On My Dreams.
Bad Games With Good Music: Tales of Legendia
Where Will You Go, Tecmo? What Will Happen to Our Love?
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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