Hour-long documentary goes behind the scenes at Volition

@dapharmic1st

I wish Valve would do one :/

@dapharmic1st Things do exist and I feel various ways about them.

@dapharmic1st

Maybe if the Volition guys spent more time working on their games... Red Faction and Saints Row... THQ wouldn't have fired a bunch of them.

@Rob Liv
Thank you for this RIVETING commentary. We all care.

@Rob Liv

To sum it up:
We made some early corridors shooter demos for Apogee who funded us, but they wanted a Doom-like game, so they eventually backed out. We then did a bit more work and shopped it around before Interplay started funding us for 2 games.

Paychecks were a scary business back then and I [the president of Volition] often considered bringing in my own personal checkbook to pay employees.

We made Descent and it did really well. We then started on an expansion pack which we ended up selling as the sequel, Decent II.

After that we split into two studios, made 2 more Descent games which did moderately well but were not huge hits, and eventually got bought out by THQ and dropping out last contracted game with Interplay amidst their financial problems.

We made an RPG for the PS2 that did alright as a launch title before starting on Red Faction based on code work we'd done for our dropped Interplay game, Descent 4. RF was a huge hit so we started on RF2. It wasn't received as well as the first title, so we decided to put the franchise on hold for awhile while we worked on some other concepts.

After finishing up Summoner 2, and having what looked like a really cool game about thieves canned, we decided to make a licensed Punisher game that was almost rated AO.

Our company kept growing, now starting to have over 100+ employees, so we made sure we had a concrete direction for most of our future titles to avoid any canceled projects.

The decision to make Saints Row, a game about the life of gangs, was pretty controversial and even drew ire from some of our own employees. After cutting up footage of other games and movies to the tune of F*** The Police, THQ immediately jumped on board the project. Upon releasing the game it did amazingly well so we went to work on the sequel.

With all the new consoles out we felt it was time to revisit destructible environments, either with Saints Row or Red Faction, so we decided to make RF:G the open world game it is. This allowed us more freedom to create better environments that didn't rely on destruction to bypass every puzzle. The game featured lots of red and yellow hues due to being set on Mars, so we felt for the next game we should mix it up a bit.

[I think that covers most of the basics of it.]

@sonicspike41

Oh, and they got the name Volition from a random glossary in a book at the very last minute before paperwork was due.

@Vespene
The FS games are gorgeous games once the Source Code mods are installed. It was gorgeous when the games were released too.

Something about the game play never felt right though. The combat somehow felt repetitive and shallow compared to Lucasarts' X-wing series of games. Starlancer's combat felt more entertaining too.

Still, it would be awesome to see a return of the Freespace series.