When inFAMOUS was released earlier this year, it was expected to fare no better than the (then) ailing PS3 library of games that didn’t meet gamer expectations. Much to everyone’s surprise — including Sucker Punch, the developer behind the game — inFAMOUS was a huge hit that propelled the validity of the PS3 as a worthwhile gaming platform into the spotlight. However, the road to gaming glory was nothing short of rocky for Sucker Punch.
During an interview with the October issue of Game Developer Magazine, Sucker Punch co-founder Chris Zimmerman described the hardships the development team suffered while struggling to find some sort of guidance with inFAMOUS:
"For the first year of the project, we really didn’t have much of an idea of what kind of game we were building. We were sure about some things — that you played as a superhero, that the game took place in a city, that it was a T-rated game — but beyond this, we weren’t sure of much. Our lack of focus cost us months and months of work, pursuing what ultimately turned out to be discarded ideas."
Zimmerman continues on to explain the difficulty encountered in the changeover from the dapper graphical style of Sly Cooper to the abrasive urban decay of inFAMOUS:
"We wildly underestimated how difficult the transition would be from the bright and cheerful PlayStation 2 graphics of the Sly Cooper games to the gritty and realistic PlayStation 3 look of inFamous. In effect, we tried to take two steps at once. First, we needed to catch up with the realism in the best-looking PlayStation 2 games; second, we needed to match the even higher quality bar being set by the best teams as they moved to the next generation of hardware. This was a struggle on multiple levels."
Luckily for us, Sucker Punch has wasted no momentum and is working furiously on the development of inFAMOUS 2, which was reported earlier and will be announced any day now.
