ESCAPE VELOCITY

How the creators of Journey To The Savage Planet emerged from Stadia's rubble to start again.

- JULIAN BENSON

On February 1, 2021, Raccoon Logic studio head Reid Schneider was on the side of a mountain snowboarding with his son when he got a phone call from the office. "Where the fuck are you?" the caller asked, interrupting what was supposed to be a celebration - his team at Typhoon Studios had just shipped the colourful sci-fi shooter Journey To The Savage Planet on Google Stadia, the first game for the corporation's cloud-streaming tech that came from an in-house team.

Google was demanding a meeting, the caller told him. "Whenever they say you have to come, you're like, 'Oh, it's one of those," creative director Alex Hutchinson says. "This is not a good day." Google had decided to shut down its Stadia Games And Entertainment division, the in-house group formed to develop games and technology for its proprietary cloud-streaming platform, and it was making all the employees redundant. This included the entire Typhoon Studios team, which Google had acquired in December 2019 to staff its new Montreal offices, barely over a year previously. "We were the first, last and only Google game ever," Hutchinson says, "and they made us redundant on the day we shipped it."

Today, as we sit in the offices of Raccoon Logic, the new studio formed from the rubble of Typhoon Studios - again in Montreal - waiting for the demonstration build of Revenge Of The Savage Planet to load, a battled-for sequel that shouldn't exist, Schneider tells us the team "took just a little bit of inspiration" from their experiences at Google.

"All of us here at head office could not be more excited to welcome you into the Alta family, and we look forward to supporting you in your adventures. Onward and upward," says Eva Pedantica, VP of Alta Interglobal, in Revenge Of The Savage Planet's introductory video. As in the first game, key narrative moments are delivered in charmingly hammy live-action cinematics.