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MinnMax Interview - How Meta Killed Ready At Dawn
🕑 Added 2025-02-10 17:15:02 +0000 UTC
MinnMax's Ben Hanson talks to the co-founder of Ready At Dawn Andrea Pessino about how the beloved studio behind Daxter and God of War on PSP, The Order: 1886, and Lone Echo was purchased by Meta and how it ultimately led to the end of the studio after 21 years. We also talk about canceled projects like a console action/adventure game published by Ubisoft, crunch, and frustrations of working with a big publisher like Sony.
You can watch and share the video version here - https://youtu.be/g7t6Wo2IcU8
Check out Game Informer's documentary on the history of Ready at Dawn here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_OcS4gAGw
To jump to a particular discussion, check out the timestamps below...
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:10 - Andrea Pessino on being finally free to talk
00:04:01 - Meta and the end of Ready At Dawn
00:15:23 - Friendship with Ru Weerasuriya
00:16:36 - Why sell Ready at Dawn to Meta?
00:19:43 - Scattering Ready at Dawn talent across the industry
00:25:51 - Why don't VR games get more attention?
00:32:34 - Cells Within and his future plans
00:36:03 - Working on StarCraft at Blizzard
00:39:11 - The future of the RTS
00:40:39 - Daxter on PSP's brutal development
00:51:56 - Is Naughty Dog still the best role model in the industry?
00:55:05 - Gamesa and the invasion of idiotic management
00:58:05 - How The Order's prototype led to Deformers
01:02:34 - The downside of GameStop publishing Deformers
01:06:07 - God of War on Vita
01:06:37 - How Naughty Dog killed Daxter 2 on PSP
01:08:31 - Creating God of War on PSP
01:10:43 - Ubisoft's absurd request on new IP
01:20:02 - Porting Okami to Wii
01:23:19 - Ready at Dawn's canceled/hidden projects
01:26:39 - What went wrong with The Order: 1886
01:37:29 - Why didn't Sony buy Ready At Dawn
01:41:49 - The sequel to The Order: 1886
01:50:29 - Building up multiplayer tech
01:52:12 - Final thoughts
Comments
K. B. Klemens III
Incredible work on this interview. Andrea gave so much to this, goes to show how respected MinnMax and Ben are becoming. Kudos ! More dev interviews please.
Shariq Chudhri
My man sounds like Javier Bardem!
