Day One – Pendulo Studios

Almost a decade ago, Runaway: A Road Adventure was cited as one of the games that helped catapult the genre back into an era of relative prominence.  Its slick visuals, offbeat humour, and unapologetically traditional point-and-click gameplay felt like an ideal blend of old-school genre conventions and modern-age production values, and its worldwide popularity blazed a trail for others to do the same.  We no longer had LucasArts, Infocom, Legend, or Sierra, but with up-and-coming international developers like Pendulo Studios emerging on the scene, the sky once again seemed the limit.  

Indeed, the genre prospered and thrived to an extent in the years to come, and Pendulo itself became a mainstay, releasing two Runaway sequels and a re-imagining of its Spanish-only Hollywood Monsters (The Next BIG Thing) before moving in a darker, bolder direction with the gritty thriller Yesterday.  There seemed to be no stopping Pendulo, but as we’ve seen many times already, not even a successful track record and a skilled development team offers any guarantees for tomorrow.  In tough economic times, publishers are even less willing to finance new adventures, particularly high-risk original IPs, and when Pendulo went looking for partners for Day One, they came away empty-handed. Once a beacon of new hope, Pendulo became the latest in a depressing line of studios to face an uncertain future without investors.

Or maybe not so depressing, just with a different type of investor.  Like several other high-profile developers of late, Pendulo has turned to crowd-funding to finance their edgy, satirical thriller about a man facing his last day alive.  Requesting €300,000 by September 7th through Gamesplanet Lab, the campaign still has a fair way to go to reach its goal.  But we’re intrigued by what we’ve seen, so we nabbed Pendulo’s art director Rafael Latiegui to discuss both the game and the challenges facing adventure developers today. (And stay tuned after the interview for some exclusive pics from past Pendulo titles!)

Pendulo Studios – 18 years of adventure

 

Adventure Gamers: You’ve managed to make five games in English and several more in Spanish either on your own or with publisher funding before now.  So I guess the obvious question is: why do you suddenly need crowd-funding to develop your next adventure?