BottleRocket bust as Namco pulls project?

By Oli Welsh Published 9 February, 2009

Splatterhouse could be moved in-house.

Rumours have emerged over the weekend suggesting that Californian developer BottleRocket has gone bust.

The studio had been working on horror remake Splatterhouse, which was supposedly close to completion and due for release within months. However, Namco Bandai is said to have pulled support. Reports say work on Splatterhouse will be finished by the in-house Namco team that made Afro Samurai, just out in the US.

Word of BottleRocket's demise first appeared on VG247 and more detail later appeared on Kotaku.

With no confirmation yet from BottleRocket or Namco, this is still officially a rumour - but sources have told Eurogamer it's genuine.

BottleRocket was founded in 2002 by the Sony team that made excellent PS2 actioners Mark of Kri and Rise of the Kasai. Although an independent studio, Splatterhouse was its only project - it had been making a game based on DC superhero The Flash for Brash Entertainment, but that publisher closed down in November last year.

So when Namco took Splatterhouse out of BottleRocket's hands on Friday - repossessing all development kits and assets, according to reports - it effectively doomed the studio to closure.

If it's true that completion of the project has been made the responsibility of the Afro Samurai team, it probably comes as an unwelcome surprise to those developers, too, gifting them two crunch periods in quick succession.

The original Splatterhouse was a gory 1988 beat-em-up for the arcade, which saw a number of home conversions and sequels. The new game - seen just days ago at New York Comic Con by 1UP - is due for release on Xbox 360 and PS3, and is apparently influenced by modern horror movies as well as the likes of Dead Rising and God of War.

Expect confirmation of this news later today, when America wakes up.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (10) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • makeamazing #1 3 years ago

    Another one bites the dust.

  • penhalion #2 3 years ago

    Gonna happen a lot in the next few years.

    These developers have managers who pay themselves like investment bankers. I said about a year or so back, that I couldn't see where the money to develope these games was coming from and now the results of these ludicrous budgets have finally caught up with the devs.

    Just like the movie industry, games are going to have to adopt an employed when needed attitude. The pay per individual will be higher as a result but, the costs overall will fall considerably.

    There should be a defined pre-production phase, where art assets, locations and scripts are created. Production, where the whole thing is put together and a post production where any tweaks and game balancing changes occur. Currently (at least in every dev I've worked at) the pre-production and post production phases may as well not exist. The whole thing is constant change from start to end. Game producers keep adding or removing elements and the whole process takes years instead of months as a result. Budgets are laughable because of this. I would estimate about 70% of a games multi-million budget is wasted on un-necessary changes and re-dos.

    So over a year ago I predicted that the mass nuking of studios big and small would be the end result. Most studios simply don't manage their game budgest or production processes well enough to be sustainable.

  • afray #3 3 years ago

    @penhalion: You say that assigning budgets and schedules before development starts is impossible because requirements change until right near the end of the project. The solution isn't therefore to freeze requirements, it's to not schedule or set budgets in stone.

    This is what agile and iterative development processes try to do. Look up scrum on wikipedia for more details, but you work to make small steps in set windows of time, adopting requirement changes at fixed intervals.

    Valve does something like this, which is why their release dates are always so vague. They don't try and pretend they can schedule themselves two years into the future because they never know what change or feature they will discover next month.

    However this splatterhouse deal seems much more like a typical bullying publisher pulling the plug just before release, to save paying the developer any more royalties. It was a common practice a few years ago to also allow publishers to snatch new IPs from devs, but I thought it had died out. Shame.

  • Flabio #4 3 years ago

    When the IP you're working on belongs to the publisher and not the developer then this can and often does happen. It's a risk you take as a developer when you sign on to work with someone elses IP.

  • Cappy #5 3 years ago

    Pity Konami didn't do this to the Silent Hill: Homecoming project.

    Though it speaks volumes for how bad the original PSP incarnation of Origins must have been to get totally canned and made over.

  • GreyBeard #6 3 years ago

    @Penhalion

    I think yours is an overly harsh assessment of the situation, particularly from the independent developer's position.

    In my experience a lot of problems arise as a result of the publisher lacking confidence in the products they commission and as a result keep shifting the goalposts during production.

    To be exact, in most cases a studio inks a deal with a publisher with the release date set in stone, but a design that is far from finalised. What should be pre-production is folded into actual production pipeline, so the publisher can make judgements based on marketing input (often from multiple territories), assessment of vertical-slice builds etc. etc.

    This can have a disastrous impact on development, especially if something major -like the overall art-style- needs overhauling after months of work has been completed.

    In my opinion a lot of disasters could be averted if publishers interfered less with the creative aspects development, and allowed the devs to actually get on and do what they are paid to do. The reason they don't is that in most cases they don't want to pay for adequate pre-production, and most small studios cannot afford to pay for it themselves especially when there is no guarantee that it will land them a deal.


  • penhalion #7 3 years ago

    @GreyBeard

    That's my point exactly! The production process simply isn't respected and as a result budgets simply run wild. This leaves studios litterally living from milestone payment to milestone payment. It was never a sustainable business model and was bound to cause mass failures.

    Remember the idiotic budgets being bandied about for this generation. It went from productions costing half a million on PS2 and XBox to productions suddenly costing 10-20 million for PS3 and 360. What shocked me was that no-one seemed to stop and say "Hang on a second that's rediculous". Instead both the studio heads and press seemed to take it as a badge of honor for the industry. Like saying "Look how much money we can throw at our games" without asking "How the frak did the budgest quadruple overnight, when PC development on hardware more powerful and feature rich has never costed this much. The obvious answer should have been it couldn't have gone up that much at all. So someone somewhere was on the rob as far as I could see and the only people in a position to be on the rob were the studio heads.

  • eddiep #8 3 years ago

    "How the *** did the budget quadruple overnight" - well, I worked on both Xbox and Xbox360 versions of the same game. The Xbox had a team of about 12 people. The 360 one used 60 people, most of them working to create the graphic assets. The small increase in realism led to an exponential increase in the amount of assets needed.

  • Gearskin #9 3 years ago

    The recent trailer does indeed sport the Surge logo, rather than Bottlerocket.

  • Meho #10 3 years ago

    "However this splatterhouse deal seems much more like a typical bullying publisher pulling the plug just before release, to save paying the developer any more royalties. It was a common practice a few years ago to also allow publishers to snatch new IPs from devs, but I thought it had died out. Shame. "

    Yes, this is exactly what this sounds like. Cynical, cold, businesslike. Very ugly too.