Former Rare creator Chris Seavor has gone indie. He’s part of the two-man team Gory Detail, who recently released their first work on Steam. Titled The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup, this stylish puzzle game has you leading a dog robot through a vicious labyrinth. It’s the type of well-executed game that gets buried all the time on today’s busy Steam marketplace. In an interview with Gameindustry.biz, Seavor seems to recognize that and reveals that an unofficial Conker sequel might be coming next.
In the interview, Chris states that he didn’t put a lot of money behind marketing his latest game. “I just don’t enjoy it. I dread it, actually. It is much easier to make a game than to sell one, at least as far as I can tell.” He also acknowledges that releasing their game on the same week as Red Dead Redemption 2 probably wasn’t the best idea, but the studio is still in a good place. Seavor and Shawn Pile are already hard at work on the studio’s next project.
This was originally going to be something like Urchin, an abandoned prototype from the duo’s Rare days. Thanks to reactions on Chris’ Twitter page, this morphed into a hybrid between Urchin and a Conker successor. Despite that plan, don’t expect the game to be a straight follow-up. “It will have all these Conker-like elements, but don’t expect an anthropomorphic squirrel or cute visuals. People might see it and go ‘that’s not Conker’, but I think they’ll get what I’m doing.”
Chris stated that there wasn’t too much of a transitional period between the two projects; he just discovered that there is still an audience for something like Conker seventeen years after the game’s release.
For fans who want to help an unofficial Conker sequel see the light of day, the best way to support the studio is to buy Rusty Pup. Gory Detail doesn’t see Kickstarter as a good way to go: “There will be expectations from the audience. You have less creative freedom. You are tied to a release date and a series of stretch goals. I don’t like worrying about when things need doing by and what people want. I just want to worry about creating.”
