What happened to developers Planet Moon Studios?

M

momolicious

Member
From Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Armed and Dangerous to Booty Blocks and Battle of the Bands? What happened, they were making amazing and funny PC games now disapeared from big awesome PC projects.
 
They recently worked on a Drawn to Life sequel.

Edit: Oops! It appears I misread your post. As to your question, I would have to assume neither Giants nor Armed and Dangerous sold well enough to let them continue to make games in that vein.
 
Their games were too good to keep existing.

Excuse me while I go buy 500 copies of GeneriShoot 7: Corridors A Plenty.

Edit 2:

Correction, most of them still work there, but one of the leads left to Ubisoft and another to ngmoco to help scam DeNA out of $400 million.
 
It's hard to reach the top when you start with mediocrity. Yes, I'm calling Giants mediocre. The Human and Siren campaigns were generic and the Kabuto campaign fell far, far short of what originally was promised (much like the original MDK). I guess Armed & Dangerous was competent, albeit forgettable.
Excuse me while I go buy 500 copies of GeneriShoot 7: Corridors A Plenty.
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Do Planet Moon employees get royalties for every copy of MDK you buy?
 
Of All Trades said:
Do Planet Moon employees get royalties for every copy of MDK you buy?
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Of course not, those go to the rotting corpses of Interplay and Shiny Entertainment Double Helix.

Also, I don't think fish people count as humans. :P
 
Nirolak said:
Of course not, those go to the rotting corpses of Interplay and Shiny Entertainment Double Helix.

Also, I don't think fish people count as humans. :P
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I had one game on my GoG wishlist (Hostile Waters). It got taken down because Interplay is in some litigation over it. Same thing goes for Battle vs Chess.
 
Armed and Dangerous seemed nice but I had already enough with the demo.

Would make a sweet $10 downloadable game.
 
Of All Trades said:
It's hard to reach the top when you start with mediocrity. Yes, I'm calling Giants mediocre. The Human and Siren campaigns were generic and the Kabuto campaign fell far, far short of what originally was promised (much like the original MDK). I guess Armed & Dangerous was competent, albeit forgettable.
Click to expand...

Meccaryn and Sea Reaper campaigns in Giants were anything but generic. How many other third person shooters task you with building and defending your base while hopping around with jetpacks, fighting humongous monsters and herding space sheep? In how many other games do you need to zoom around huge levels defending your base from waves of soldiers using nothing but spells and fighting other similarly powerful spellcasters? Both campaigns had their flaws (shooting in the Meccaryn campaign was wonky, which is rather damning for a shooter, while most Sea Reaper missions were drawn out and tedious - not to forget that dreadful motorboat race), but they were certainly not generic. Much like Shiny's Messiah, it was an ambitious game; flawed, but still quite enjoyable.

On the other hand, Armed and Dangerous was a pretty straightforward shooter, but it was tremendous fun. It was a true sequel to the masterpiece that was MDK, much better than that terrible, terrible BioWare's MDK sequel.
 
I liked Giants, but it was no MDK (or MDK 2). Everything went downhill with Armed & Dangerous - so promising but so kind of shitty. Infected was interesting but got washed over with all the other early PSP releases and felt a little bargain-bin.
 
Last year, they worked together with Microsoft on an exclusive game which fell victim to their Kinect-only strategy.
 
As someone mentioned, they did the Wii Drawn To Life game for THQ.

I believe they also did the Tangled game? It's not listed on their site, though.

http://www.planetmoon.com/

Regarding why they're no longer doing what they did when they got started... it's REALLY hard to be an independent studio now, and almost impossible to do new IP for retail. It also doesn't help, of course, that all of their games sold horribly.

I think the only way you're going to see stuff like that is if they scale their ambitions back and channel their previous creative style into downloadable games... assuming the creative types responsible for those are even there any more.
 
I didn't really care for Giants: Citizen Kabuto, but Armed and Dangerous had it's moments. The characters, dialogue, land shark and reverse gravity were funny and entertaining.
 
Ravidrath said:
I believe they also did the Tangled game? It's not listed on their site, though.
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This is true. I actually played through that game for a variety of poor reasons that had me intrigued when they really should have turned me away (current day Planet Moon developing among them) and its a weird game.
The second level is an hour long minigamefilled fetch quest in a bar, and then after that the levels get increasingly shorter and sloppier like they were taking their sweet time and then had to start rushing it midway through development.
Also none of the characters move their mouths when they talk. In 2010.
 
The company's COO was the guy who ran Next-Generation Online and Daily Radar.

The company has a great office in San Francisco, and I got to visit when I did some work for it. There are a lot of good people there, too. Planet Moon may have had to adjust its focus, but it still makes pretty darn good games.
 
Shiggy said:
Last year, they worked together with Microsoft on an exclusive game which fell victim to their Kinect-only strategy.
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:(

Oh boy, another reason to hate Kinect.




Nirolak said:
Their games were too good to keep existing.

Excuse me while I go buy 500 copies of GeneriShoot 7: Corridors A Plenty.

Edit 2:

Correction, most of them still work there, but one of the leads left to Ubisoft and another to ngmoco to help scam DeNA out of $400 million.
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This could've been Dudebro.

unrelated: who came up with the dudebro term, anyway? First usage, etc.
 
Of All Trades said:
Do Planet Moon employees get royalties for every copy of MDK you buy?
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What games around that time were even similar to MDK? I can't remember of any, nothing memorable anyway.
 
Shiggy said:
Didn't look too good though, probably something for XBLA.



(Image by Unseen64 who seem to have trouble with their servers)
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Yes. Maybe they scrapped it because it was bad ?
 
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