Bethesda Forced Title on Them; Prey Devs Call It a Big Mistake
The founder and former creative director of Arkane Studios has brought to the surface an inconvenient for Bethesda, yet interesting fact about the 2017 game Prey.
Released in 2017, the sci-fi action FPS Prey has made some waves upon launch. After years of leaks and official announcements, we got a game that actually had little in common with the 2006 shooter with the same name. For years gamers have been wondering why Arkane Studios decided to title its upcoming game like it did. Only now, after five years, have we learned that the developer had little say in the matter.
According to Raphael Colantonio - founder and former creative director of Arcane - the game's publisher, Bethesda Softworks, was the cause. Colantonio has recently appeared on several podcasts discussing the development process of Prey. In the latest episode of the AIAS Game Maker's Notebook series on YouTube, the former director made no secret of his disdain for the publisher. The relevant fragment begins at 45 minutes and 30 seconds:
"Calling this game Prey was very very hard for me. I didn't want to do it, I had to tell journalists lies, and I hate lying... It was bad to support a message I didn't identify with," revealed Colantonio
The former Arkane Studios creative director noted that he and many other Arkane employees felt "disgust" at the use of the name, and considered it a "punch in the face" to the developers of Prey from 2006:
"I wanted to apologize to them many, many times. [...] I didn't really have that chance, because to be honest, I don't know these people. It was never our intention to steal their IP. That would have been disgusting, which is why I didn't want to do it," added the director
Colantonio also said he believed that calling the game Prey may have contributed to the lack of commercial success of this enagaging game (after nearly nine months after its release, unofficial calculations indicated 1.3 million copies sold). It is worth mentioning that Raphael Colantonio left the studio in June 2017 - just a month after the release of Prey. Despite the adversity, the director is still active in the industry (he founded WolfEye Studios responsible for the warmly received game Weird West). Colantonio says his new goal is to "maintain true independence" and create (and name according to his conscience) smaller games.
