In 2005, Xbox 360 was new to stores, PlayStation 3 was around the corner, media giants Namco and Bandai had just merged, and Makoto Iwai took a job as a senior vice president at Namco Bandai’s newly joined U.S. office.
Iwai, a Sony veteran, says his mission was clear: to find a local hit for the new generation. The company had a stable of legacy franchises like Ridge Racer and Tekken from its studios in Japan, but the Western market was growing. Violent, edgy, Western-focused games like Grand Theft Auto were taking off, and Namco Bandai wanted a piece of that success.
It tried a game based on the American anime series Afro Samurai. It tried a reboot of in-house action series Dead to Rights. It tried the mythological adventure Enslaved. It tried a gravity shifting shooter called Inversion. And then there was Splatterhouse.
A late-’80s gore-fest, the Splatterhouse series originally flickered to life in arcades. Taking advantage of the slasher genre’s popularity, the game featured a Jason Voorhees-like masked hero named Rick splattering a variety of ghoulish creatures in a crude beat-’em-up.
Since it was a brutal, M-rated franchise and Namco Bandai owned the IP, the publisher’s American branch was enthusiastic. “Resident Evil was a big success by Capcom,” says Iwai. “We sought similar success by using a well-known franchise. I thought that was a shortcut.”
“I learned a lot from [Splatterhouse] I wouldn’t wish on anybody else,” says Russell Schiffer, Namco Bandai’s senior director of technology, laughing as he speaks.
Enter BottleRocket
To kick off development of the project in 2007, Namco Bandai chose BottleRocket Entertainment. The studio was staffed with many members of the team that had worked on Sony’s PlayStation 2 brawler The Mark of Kri, a critical darling known for an unusual targeting system where button command prompts appeared above enemy heads.
“I knew Jay [Beard, BottleRocket founder],” says Iwai. “There was a strong push from the studio side to use BottleRocket. They were quite renowned.”
That wasn’t the plan BottleRocket followed, beginning a rift between the developer and publisher.
“There was a big pull between what Namco wanted and what Jay Beard wanted,” says Scott Holty, who joined BottleRocket seven months into development as a senior designer. “Those two things never really coincided. They were never in lockstep with what each side wanted with the game.”
Many involved in the project say BottleRocket’s approach resembled its past work a little too closely.
“They were really trying to shoehorn [in] that blue/red Mark of Kri targeting system, and that’s not what Namco wanted at all,” says former BottleRocket concept artist Dave Wilkins.
“There was a guy with a TV set on his head, and it was plugged into his crotch. It wasn’t very Splatterhouse-like,” says Alvin Chung, brought on as an environment artist at BottleRocket. “The new designs were just kind of oddball. I don’t even know how to describe it. [...] From a video game perspective, they didn’t really read well. You couldn’t tell what it was.”
These ideas strayed from Namco Bandai’s desired path.
“They were basically supposed to work on Splatterhouse along with a design document of which we mutually agreed,” says Iwai. “That part only showed when our staff visited with them. Right after Bandai Namco staff left their premises, they started doing a different thing, which was ordered by Jay.”
“Every single time they’d deliver a milestone, [Namco Bandai] had complaints and issues with it. They kept reiterating they did not want Mark of Kri,” says Holty.
In addition to the design not meeting Namco’s specifications, a variety of behind-the-scenes problems at BottleRocket created a development bottleneck. Progress slowed.
In the art department, Chung came onto the project, joining a team composed mostly of recent graduates.
“I don’t think they [had] produced anything for the PlayStation 3 before,” says Chung. “I remember coming in and working on one level, and they never understood how a normal map could make something look good. It was mind-blowing.”
“Splatterhouse from the BottleRocket side started off showing some really nice progress, and then it started to feel like [BottleRocket] producers were showing us, ‘Look, we reworked the art on this character — again,’” says Schiffer. “That started sending up red flags about ‘gosh, why aren’t you showing us more gameplay progress?’ [...] We would see gameplay along the way, of course, but after so many of those, and it was several of them — other people, not me; the people on the business side — began to get nervous. When they looked into it deeper, they determined progress was not at the rate we wanted it to be.”
”It’s always difficult in that position because you want to push for your creative voice, but at the same time, you’re trying to represent the company you’re working for,” says Holty. “Then you also realize that Namco is the one that’s paying the company.”
BottleRocket’s team, with Jay Beard continuing with more or less the same vision, progressed on Splatterhouse for 18 to 24 months. The Flash continued as well, keeping BottleRocket working at capacity. Then, in November 2008, Brash Entertainment shuttered, which meant that BottleRocket’s development on The Flash no longer had funding. That left BottleRocket with Splatterhouse and a second team without work.
Namco Bandai higher-ups were still displeased with BottleRocket’s lack of progress. “When I saw it, it was a collection of features and pieces but with no real metagame behind it, and the tools were so poorly implemented that no design was coming,” says David Robinson, Namco Bandai’s executive producer on Splatterhouse.
“I went down there and started meeting with the guys, trying to get my own feel for it,” says Roger Hector, then the senior vice president of product development at Namco Bandai. “To make a long story short, everyone shook hands and said, ‘Yeah, we’re on it. It’s all good.’ When the deliveries were due and the stuff they were supposed to be doing wasn’t happening, I had to make a recommendation into Namco and say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like it’s going to look very well.’”
(BottleRocket founder Jay Beard didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
With quality issues continuing, Namco Bandai made the decision to pull Splatterhouse from BottleRocket in February 2009.
Hauling away
That same day, Namco Bandai brought a U-Haul truck to BottleRocket’s offices to collect development kits. Some on the team had no advance notice.
“It was just a normal workday,” says Holty. “Everyone goes to work and there’s a bunch of moving trucks in front of the company. Everyone’s like, ‘What’s going on?’”
Former Namco Bandai associate producer Dan Tovar, who had been with the project from its earliest point, recalls that day: “What followed was one of the most unpleasant experiences I have had to date in my professional career.” Tovar continues, “There were grown men crying. [...] ‘Hellish’ doesn’t quite summarize it.”
“We didn’t cancel the game. We fired the management.”
“They pulled us all inside and said, ‘That paycheck you got today? This is your last check, because we don’t have any money in the bank,’” says Dave Wilkins.
Not all was lost for some members of the BottleRocket team, though. During the dev kit retrieval, Namco Bandai management handed out some business cards. Splatterhouse wasn’t canceled — development was to continue, but now under the banner of Namco Bandai.
“We think it was Jay who misled the studio,” adds Iwai. “Some of the artists were really good. Some of the game designers, too.”
“The management spent the money; the kids didn’t,” says Robinson. “We didn’t cancel the game. We fired the management.”
Two days later, BottleRocket sent out a sharp response: “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 time frame or Namco’s management of the title was inept.”
Asked now about his comments, Iwai says, “I knew I couldn’t go into details. [...] I know people tend to blame the publisher for canceling a project, but that’s not the case always. It was purely a performance issue.”
To Carlsbad
In an attempt to continue cohesively, Namco Bandai hired a number of BottleRocket’s developers, forming a studio in Carlsbad, California, near BottleRocket’s San Diego location. The group would work together with Namco Bandai’s studio in Santa Clara, California, the team responsible for 2009’s Afro Samurai.
“We were flying back and forth quite a bit just so we could maintain continuity and have team meetings,” says Holty. “Plus, in the beginning, I had to go and teach all the tools to all the designers and artists, and get that whole team up to speed.”
The new Carlsbad group needed to put together a full team. Roger Hector and others pulled a number of BottleRocket’s key members into the fold, including physics programmer Michael Seare, whom Hector tried to hire.
“I’m not necessarily proud of what I did here, but at the time when [Hector] approached me, I had accepted an offer from Rockstar San Diego,” says Seare. “I was going to start working on a Monday. Hector contacted me twice over that weekend to discuss a number of details about establishing the Carlsbad studio, and I said yeah, I’ll do it. That meant going into work at Rockstar on Monday and quitting.”
Namco Bandai sought to keep the budget in check — having already paid for a year of development time — which meant tight schedules and heavy pressure.
Late-night salvage job
The two teams began parsing what they could keep. BottleRocket hadn’t completed a usable amount of work. “There was the rough shell of a bunch of levels, but you could not play the whole thing front to back,” says Tovar. “Huge amounts of systems were not complete, and most importantly, it just wasn’t fun.” Saving any of that work meant reducing costs and time. Robinson formed a plan.
“The only way we could ship was if we created days without cutting features,” says Robinson. “How do you create days? Well, we had close to 90 street days of bugs, but only 62 days of bug days to cure. We were going to blast through this schedule in two, three months. What we’ll do is, I’ll stay up all night, every night. I’ll change the whole team schedules so that testing happens while everyone is asleep.
”There was an occasion, a few times, in three days I think I slept for three hours,” Chung recalls. “I remember just sleeping on the floor and taking a break.”
Some work from the BottleRocket days gave the team a reprieve during those long nights.
“There was this weird concept art, back before we started, of this weird zombie-looking dude with a car battery strapped to his ass, and he was wearing a diaper,” says Wilkins. “When we would be grinding late hours, waiting on pizza to come and it’s 2 a.m. to get a build done [and] everybody’s dragging ass, we would send that email out with that picture and ‘never forget,’ and you could just hear, all across the studio, everyone would just lose their mind laughing.”
Keeping some of BottleRocket’s work created problems as well. To save time, Rick’s original animation rig remained. “You can see [in the final game] he’s got a really short bicep [and] his head’s a little bit big, and it’s all because we had to make that skeleton work,” says Wilkins.
Splatterhouse also gained a cel-shaded art style, similar to what the internal team at Namco Bandai did with Afro Samurai. “At that time with Afro, we kind of led the industry in that research. … [We felt] we could really push this agenda of ‘we own this art style,’” says Robinson.
“From Bandai or Namco’s management perspective, it might be too much,” says Iwai. “But I said, ‘You guys want to achieve global success. The M-rated games market is such a huge market. If we are capable of going into the market, why don’t we?’ Some people didn’t like the M rating in the beginning, but somehow I was able to shut the noise down.”
The $20 million bust
Splatterhouse development continued for a year under the new long-distance arrangement, with heavy crunch and overnight schedules. That brought the total cost to roughly $20 million before Namco Bandai released Splatterhouse on Nov. 23, 2010.
Asked if Splatterhouse did well financially, Iwai simply replies, “Unfortunately, not really.”
“We missed a critical Halloween launch that many thought would have made a huge difference in the commercial success,” says Tovar.
“We did the best we could. What you got in the box at the end was 75 percent of what we going for.”
“We hadn’t heard from Sony,” he says. “I think Namco realized it, because Hector called me again and asked me if I would remain on staff — just me — and if there are any last-minute bugs, fix and resubmit to Sony. I’ve been through this before, and I knew in the past that it took more than one engineer to fix these bugs. Sometimes there were design issues, and I was petrified. But fortunately, a couple of days after talking to Roger, Sony came back and accepted. I was on staff for maybe a week longer than the rest of the crew.”
Looking back, those speaking for this story share fond memories of the team around them, forming a positive outlook on the end product.
“I don’t feel ashamed of it all, but I can’t look back on it without saying, ‘Boy, if we just had a little bit more time, we could have taken it up a notch,’” says Hector.
“Even though it’s probably the lowest-rated game I worked on, in retrospect, when I think about its production, because of the limited resources, it felt like we built a tight camaraderie,” says Chung. “Everyone was proud to finish it considering the circumstances.”
“That game just didn’t have the tools to be polished the way it needed to be polished,” says Robinson. “Like most great opportunities, it just simply ran out of money.”
As of this story posting, Splatterhouse sits at a 59 Metacritic score on PlayStation 3, and a 62 on Xbox 360. Yet for Roger Hector, Splatterhouse represents the unpredictability and turmoil of game design, and for him, that’s a sign of success.
“Every game design project, if it doesn’t have troubles, it’s not trying hard enough,” says Hector.