X-Men Destiny had its genesis from an executive producer from Activision, he really liked Too Human, and he wanted to do a game in the X-Men universe like Too Human, as an original title. After some initial talks we started working on this project together.
Financially and in project management terms, the plan was that we were going to work on this project and increase the budget as we go. They wanted to make it a major AAA project. And that was the plan and one of the reasons Silicon Knights actually put more money into the project than we got paid, because we were ramping up for a bigger budget.
Anyway, something happened in the middle of the project that no one saw coming. Whats really funny, even to this day, is that Ive never seen anyone comment on it, but its the most obvious thing to me and it changed everything. During the middle of this project, Marvel was sold to Disney, and suddenly, Activision was now working for a competitor Disney. Disney made video games, and Activision made games, but Marvel never did on their own. And everything changed at that point.
And at the time, I dont know if anyone remembers, but there were quite a few layoffs there, and our budget was substantially cut. And anyone whos makes games knows that having your budget cut is tough, especially when youre expecting it to ramp up. Its really tough to deal with, even worse in the middle of the project. It has huge impact on the scope and the potential for the end product to even be shipped.
Now, while all this was going on, as you can imagine it was a very emotional time both for Silicon Knights, Activision, Marvel, and even for Disney. Now imagine suddenly all four of these companies are involved. Heres where it gets really, really, complicated. We didnt want the budget to get cut down of course, and theres always disagreements about money. Contracts take time to be agreed by all parties.
During that time, we actually did not get paid for X-Men Destiny for about three months or so.
So, from that point, Silicon Knights started funding 100% of that title on our own with our own money. We were basically balancing it but we could only do it for so long. But we didnt want the project to die, and we hoped the negotiations would go through and the project would continue, but it was in extreme danger of being canceled. This wreaks havok for development and forces huge unexpected changes. At this point, there were only a few people within Silicon Knights that were aware of the situation which would be normal of any software development.
I remember we were having company meetings and some people in the company were bringing up questions like Why are we spending any of our time and money on this other project when Activisions paying us? Ironically and unaware to them actually the opposite was true. We werent getting any money from Activision at the time and Silicon Knights was paying for both projects on its own. But you cant say that to people. You dont want to say that Hey this revenue stream is in jeopardy. You, know, its just not something you share with the development staff for a variety of reasons. You have to keep the morale high which isnt possible if people are working in the fear that all their hard work could get cancelled. In reality, maybe 3 or 4 people within Silicon Knights actually knew the facts about what was happening. And I can understand employees getting all upset and making things up in their head because they didnt have the facts.
In order to solve try to solve the problem, we approached Disney and started talks with them, asking what we could do to fix the problem and have them become the publisher. We talked about the game, and they really liked its potential. And finally some conversations started going on between all the companies involved. Again, none of the regular staff knew about this.
My recollection was that all parties involved wanted to make the switch but the deal that Activision had with Marvel and later with Disney was so complicated and detailed to unravel, and it could not be done, and it couldnt be fixed. So everyone had to deal with the project as it was. Finally, on top of all that, the person who was the champion of this project left Activision and many of the staff that started with the project were laid off.
Everyone involved did try to do their best, but it was one of those situations where it just hit all of these roadblocks and no matter what we tried to do it just didnt turn out well. I apologized for the problems on the project, I had higher hopes for the game and I hope everyone understands that you can only do so much under situations like that.
With all this in mind, I hope that people can understand that what occurred could not be further from the allegations Kotaku published in that article and why accusations like this should never be made without documentation or other evidence beyond word of mouth. We were putting more money in than we were being paid, we risked everything to keep that project alive. It didnt turn out how we expected but we did everything possible to make this game the best we could given the constraints.
