Oh Internet

Wow, what a weird feeling. I’ve just found out that Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer has finally been released. This was one of the last games that we worked on at Vis before the company crawled up its own arse and died.

The product was kind of in limbo, since the game had been completed and had passed Sony certification when the company shut down, but hadn’t hit the store shelves yet. At one time the publisher (SCEE) was planning a big marketing push for it, since it was targeted for younger kids (7- to 12- ish) and was actually pretty fun. It’s definitely the best game that was ever made at Vis, so it’s kind of disappointing to see it limp out of the door with no fanfare whatsoever.

In a way, I’d have expected that they’d actually try to push it at least a little bit. I mean, it still had the potential to sell some copies, and Sony spent enough money on it that you’d think they’d want at least some of the investment back.

It’s hard to be too sad about the whole thing though, since no-one who actually did any work on the game will ever see any money out of it no matter how well it does. The team who worked on it were essentially told, “Hey great, you finished the game! By the way, you’re all unemployed now!” So, I guess that if you were planning to buy the game you could just skip it and bung me a fiver instead?

The last Vis game in progress, State of Emergency 2, was bought up by DC Studios and is going to be published by Playlogic. I have lots of things to say about that whole situation, but sadly I think that most of them could probably get me sued. Suffice to say I’m assuming from the fact that the game hasn’t already come out that the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Computer Industry, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.