Martyn Brown of Team 17 has said: ”Yeah, hands up, it wasn’t great.” Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust was bombed from orbit by critics and fans alike when it retailed.
The studio boss wouldn’t ”rattle on about excuses” why it lacked greatness, but admitted your ”only as good as your last game.” Would they have self-funded it? ”Would we bollocks.”
”I’ll be open as anything. Larry didn’t turn out great,” Brown told VideoGamer.com.
”There are reasons why it didn’t turn out great. I’m not going to rattle on about excuses. It’s one of those things. You’re only as good as your last game. Hopefully the new Worms on LIVE Arcade, other than a couple of bugs that went unnoticed on, not our testing unit but a testing unit, which we’re fixing - I think the Metacritic on that is 84, 85 per cent.”
”Certainly with Alien Breed, if anybody’s got any grumbles about what we can and can’t do, they’ll see the amount of effort and care put into a product where we’re unbridled by any nonsense we had to deal with in the Larry project,” he went on.
”Yeah, hands up, it wasn’t great. At the end of the day people don’t have to buy anything. They go on reviews, they go on demos and everything else. If people make that decision that’s unfortunate. It’s not something we’re worried about.”
With the release of Alien Breed Evolution, the Team 17 studio are self-publishing it as a digital title download. They don’t want the standard developer/publisher deal.
”The great thing about doing the self publishing - it’s all self-funded – everything we’re risking is ours, and ours to lose,” explained Brown. ”Would we have self-funded, would we have done Larry by ourselves? Would we bollocks.”
”We wouldn’t have done that. We were making a game based on somebody else’s script, somebody else’s ideas, and it’s very difficult in that position. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and that was unfortunate.”
Team 17 is confident they haven’t lost their following given the disaster of Leisure Suit Larry. What say you, videogamer? Alien Breed Evolution is coming to XBLA, PSN and PC this fall.
