Sucker Punch is turning 20 next month! Started in October of 1997, this studio has come a long way, and are most well known for the Sly Cooper and inFamous series. To celebrate the upcoming anniversary, co-founder Chris Zimmerman has talked about the studio’s history on the PlayStation.Blog.
For example, you may be surprised that Sucker Punch’s first game wasn’t for a Sony console:
We’ve been on Team Sony for a long time, but our first game was actually for the Nintendo 64—Rocket: Robot on Wheels, a light-hearted physics-based platformer starring a plucky maintenance robot who has to rescue a theme park from the dastardly clutches of a criminally-minded raccoon. After two years of hard work, a smattering of critical success, and a somewhat tepid response from the game-buying public, we took one important thing away from the project: “criminally-minded raccoon”.
This first game led them to create the Sly Cooper series:
Working on the Sly games was tons of fun, but if you make a game for kids about a master thief and his friends pulling off crazy heists, you can’t help worrying that the message you’re sending to the youth of the world is “Hey Kids! Stealing Is Cool!” Which would be the worst public service announcement ever. Eventually we decided that Sly was such a skillful thief that he only steals from other thieves, and explained this rule in the first five minutes of the game. We crossed our fingers—and managed to not trigger a tweener crime wave. Whew!
There are some interesting tidbits about inFamous’ beginnings as well:
After seven or so years of Sly Cooper, it was time for a new challenge, and we left toon shading behind. We set out to make a game that told the sort of super-hero story we all loved. Eventually, that game turned into inFamous, but that’s not how it started.
At first, we were building a superhero version of Animal Crossing. You roamed your city, tracked down criminals, helped out the citizens, and did some light zoning work along the way. The best superheroes have alter egos, right? So your alter ego was a property developer, deciding where to put the pet shops and tiki bars the citizens were demanding. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it wasn’t. After six months of experimentation we gave up on property development and focused on superhero action.
There is plenty more at the PlayStation.Blog.
What are you hoping to see from Sucker Punch next?
[Source: PlayStation.Blog]
