THE MAKING OF HUNT: SHOWDOWN

How a set of assets rescued from a dying project became Crytek’s masterpiece

- Jeremy Peel

Game developers are used to a complicated sense of ownership. The designer who conceives a game in preproduction might not be the same who sees it to completion; the publisher to whom the IP legally belongs may never touch its code. Yet for the team at Crytek Frankfurt back in 2013, the answer was unusually clear: Hunt wasn’t theirs.

Hunt: Horrors Of The Gilded Age, as it was known then, lived on another continent. As THQ collapsed, Crytek’s Cevat Yerli had swooped into Austin, Texas to hire Vigil head David Adams, and subsequently many of the studio’s former staff. Hunt would be the next step for the Darksiders team: an action-RPG reshaped by the added contemporary twist of four-player co-op. It was even developed on the same computers as Darksiders – in a practical gesture of continuity, Crytek had bought those too. “We received updates through monthly team company meetings,” recalls Crytek Frankfurt’s Dennis Schwarz. “I was always curious to see the next steps and how this whole thing evolved. But obviously, we weren’t a part of the development process.”

Until, that was, Hunt’s dramatic origin story took a further turn. 2014 turned out to be the most traumatic year in Crytek’s history. After a period of rapid growth that peaked with nearly 1,000 staff across nine studios, the company was entering a phase of painful contraction. With employees left waiting for pay, Crytek sold off Homefront: The Revolution and its veteran UK developer. The former Vigil team, meanwhile, was stripped to the bones, reduced to providing engine support for local CryEngine licensees.