Prey by Arkane wasn’t supposed to be Prey

Let’s play Prey today. I dare say that you have not escaped the tempting tongue twisters that have appeared around the game called Mining from Arkan Studioseven several years after its publication. But when the studio released a game with such an apt title in 2017, it got into a rather nasty dispute with the developers who had released the game of the same name eleven years before them. But, as it turned out recently, the studio was well aware of this and they didn’t want to call their game “Prey”.

Directed by Prey Rafael Colantonioin a recent interview on the AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, mentioned that Arkane Studios was forced to use the name by their publisher, Bethesda, and that it was really “disgusting”.

“I didn’t want to call the game ‘Prey’. Colantonio said. “However, I had to tell reporters that I wanted it so much that I didn’t like it. I do not like to lie. This is a promotional lie and it’s not a personal lie or anything like that, but I still felt bad about having to maintain a message I didn’t want to. Not only me, but no one on the team wanted the game to be called Prey. Our game had nothing to do with Prey.”

The main reason the team didn’t want their game to be called Prey was because a game with the same name already existed and fell into the hands of Human head studios. The project was released back in 2006 and was a first-person shooter in which we followed the story of Tommy when he, his girlfriend and grandfather were abducted by aliens to their own ship. Studio even planned a sequelbut after the transfer of the brand’s intellectual property from 3D Realms to Bethesda, Softworks could not resist, and the sequel itself was canceled in 2014.

But Colantonio also called the decision to name the game Prey marketing error. He knew that fans of the original game would boycott Arkane Studios’ new work, and conversely, those who didn’t like 2006’s Prey wouldn’t even be interested in the new game. And this, too, was confirmed; sales of Prey were 60% lower than those of the previous project Arkane, the second part of Dishonored, in the first week. The title received generally good reviews, but it’s definitely not what the companies were expecting in terms of sales.

“I wanted to apologize to them many times. But I didn’t have a chance because I don’t know these people very well. We never intended to steal their intellectual property and make it our own. It’s disgusting and I didn’t want to do it.” Colantonio tells the original creators of Prey. The director left Arkane shortly after the game’s release in 2017 and admits that one of the reasons for this was a disagreement with management.

Whether the Arkane studio will take a step towards a sequel is still unknown. They have a brand, but the question is whether the team wants to work on Prey at all.