I’ve wanted to write about this since the studio closed a year ago. Now that Contraband is also canceled I think it’s time, especially since Contraband was one of the big reasons why I left the company. The blog post turned out much bigger than expected though. There was a lot to get off my chest…
I worked at Avalanche Studios NYC from July 2012 to December 31st 2019, seven and a half years. I wasn’t there for most of Contraband’s development but it was obvious early on that it was going to be a very difficult project. If anything I’m surprised it lasted that long before being canceled.
The studio was born out of ambition. It failed because it could not deliver on that ambition. So this will necessarily be negative. But we had a good run and made two good games. I have so many memories and thoughts that I need to get written down somewhere, so lets celebrate the good and talk about the troubles.
Founding a Studio to Make Better Games
I wasn’t there for the founding. The studio opened at the end of 2011. It was an expansion for Avalanche Studios in Stockholm. (not to be confused with Avalanche Software in Utah) That company was doing well: Both Just Cause 2 and Renegade Ops were widely considered to be surprisingly good games. theHunter was a profitable franchise, and Mad Max and Iron Man (later canceled) were under development. The story I heard was that Christofer Sundberg (co-founder of Avalanche Studios) loved New York and liked the idea of starting a studio there. Then the stars must have aligned where they got a contract from Square to develop Just Cause 3 and at the same time were able to hire a team from Kaos Studios who had just shut down. One motivation was that the NYC studio would hire talent that they didn’t have access to in Stockholm, because apparently a lot of talent isn’t interested in moving to Sweden.
Also the studio had grown like crazy after Just Cause 1 to do several different projects at once, only for all but JC2 to fail. So I think they were scared to have three projects in one studio, so why not try starting a second studio?
Joining as a Junior Among Seniors
I joined as a tools-programmer in 2012, straight out of college. I remember being shown around the office and introduced to people as a tools-programmer and designer Jesse Johansen’s reaction was “oh thank god”, in a voice that made it clear how frustrated he had been with the tools.
The team was still fairly new. We had inherited an engine that went from Just Cause 2 to Mad Max to us. So a lot of Just Cause 2 features had been ripped out (water, animals) or had broken. When I joined, a basic version of water was working again but there really wasn’t much in the game. The most exciting thing was an art test where they had set up a small town with high quality buildings. (no one knew what “next-gen” would look like and the town looks significantly better in the finished game)
There had been no tools-programmer before, so the level editor had been kept barely working by random devs helping out a little bit, so productivity for designers and artists wasn’t exactly great. My first commit on my first day was to disable a “create road” button because it would just crash whenever you clicked it.
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