Avalanche Studios NYC Retrospective – An Ambitious Company Ruined

Summary

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...