Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City may not have gotten great reviews when it was released in 2012, but it still sold well enough to become a top seller in Japan with more than 3.2 million copies sold. So why did studio Slant Six Games not make anything else? There were leaked assets on Operation Raccoon City discs for Star Wars Battlefront 3.
While the leaked assets aren’t new news, Andy Santos, game director for Operation Raccoon City, revealed that the asset leak not only led to the next Slant Six game getting cancelled, it was a big part in the studio getting completely shut down. This information comes from an interview Santos gave with GameWatcher.
"There were Star Wars assets on the Operation Raccoon City disc. That led, unfortunately, to our new game being cancelled,” Santos told GameWatcher. “It wasn’t a sequel, it was a different game. It was a very sad moment."
While this new game wasn’t going to be an Operation Raccoon City sequel, it’s still sad to hear about games that don’t even make it to an announcement before being cancelled. What’s worse is the Star Wars assets on the disc weren’t intentionally included. In fact, Santos said he didn’t even know about them until news broke that the assets existed.
"We might have got a few terrible review scores, but it was number one in Japan. After making this number one game we got our second game cancelled because of these Star Wars assets being on the disc,” said Santos. “I only found out about them from the news story, and I went into work and found out by the end of the day that our next game wasn’t going to be made with Capcom."
This leak must have made Capcom wary to work with Slant Six on anything else. Because there were no new projects to work on, the studio had to close its doors.
"We tried to get other projects but sadly the company failed to do that, so ultimately it lead to the closure of Slant Six,” said Santos. “We must be the only industry where we can have a number one hit and still get first layoffs and then end the whole company!"
While this was a sad time for Slant Six, developers at the company have since moved on to new studios and games. Santos is currently the head of design and production at Atomicom, working on the soon-to-be-released JCB Pioneer: Mars. This survival game in space will be coming to Steam soon, with Atomicom aiming to have Early Access available by the end of September.
So what do you think? Are you sad to hear how a small mistake killed off an entire studio? Do you want to know more about this cancelled game that Slant Six was working on? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
