When Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay released on PC and Xbox in 2004, the review scores for the game ended up being far higher than what many people had expected, with most simply assuming the title would be yet another mediocre film tie-in to add to the ever-growing pile.
Serving as a prequel to the science fiction film Pitch Black, released in the year 2000, and its 2004 sequel Chronicles of Riddick, the first-person action-adventure game bucked the trend of rushed and uninspiringly bland licensed projects, boasting some stunning visuals alongside a brilliant mix of stealth, hand-to-hand combat, and satisfying run and gunning.
However, according to the former Starbreeze developer and art director Jens Matthies in a recent NoClip documentary, the game almost never happened at all, with the project being cancelled "two thirds of the way through development" by its publisher Vivendi Universal Games.
Of course, that in itself could be described as pretty crazy (at least in hindsight) considering how well-received the game went on to become, but what kicks the strangeness factor up a notch is that the team apparently wasn't even told about this decision, with the group simply pushing ahead oblivious to its cancellation.
"Our publisher guy didn't tell us about it," Matthies revealed during the NoClip documentary, which focuses on the origins of the MachineGames — a company the art director later helped to co-found. "We kept going. Because back then if you released a movie license game the whole point of that was a marketing tool for the movie."
What ended up happening, though, was that the film studio had apparently put a lot of importance on the game coming, so, according to Matthies, they applied some pressure to make Vivendi Universal change its mind.
"Fortunately, the movie studio needed that component as part of their marketing plan," Matthies said. "So they basically forced the publisher to restart the game again, uncancel it. So the game was cancelled for two weeks and we didn't know about it."
Following the release of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, it subsequently received a sequel The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena in 2009 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 (a Mac version released one year later), which also included a new version of Butcher Bay.
Sadly, both games are no long being offered on any modern storefronts, such as Steam or GOG, and aren't backwards compatible on Xbox. In other words, the only way to play them is to track down a secondhand copy or resort to other methods we won't get into here.