Feature: 'Postmortem: Indigo Prophecy'

Today's main Gamasutra feature is the full, extended Postmortem of Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy, as originally written by game designer and writer David Cage for the June/July 2006 issue of Gamasutra sister magazine Game Developer. This extended version of the feature clocks in at over double the length of what appears in the magazine, and features more intimate details on the full breadth of this ambitious game's development - both the good points, and the bad. In the following extract, Cage touches on the difficulties of pitching a game with an original concept and IP: "I often say that a truly original project cannot be signed by a publisher except if based on a misunderstanding, because if the publisher really understood what he was signing, he would never sign it. The initial presentation of Indigo Prophecy was capable of terrifying even the most foolhardy of publishers (and these are few on the ground…). The challenge of the project was to create an experience in which the player would control the main protagonists of a story in which his choices would modify the course of events. No gun, no car, no action, no puzzle… The first publishers I spoke with took me at best for a harmless dreamer, at worst for a madman. The publisher's first reaction when evaluating a new project is to look at the sales figures for games in the same category. In my case, he either considered that the game was a new genre, therefore having no comparable reference, or else that it belonged in the category of adventure games, an economically minor genre. Clearly not a good omen for Indigo Prophecy…" You can read the full Gamasutra feature for more, including previously unpublished concept art (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).