It seems that the developers of the fictional FPS game Prey were not happy with the name of the game, and the decision to link the game to Prey IP was one of the reasons why the creative director left the studio he founded.
Released in 2017, Prey shares the same name as the little-known FPS developed by Human Head Studios in 2006. Although it shares a few similarities with this game, it was promoted as a redesign of Prey intellectual property owned by publisher Bethesda. However, Raphaël Colantonio, creative director and Arkane founder, said that his team didn’t like the name and it was forced into the team.
“I had a bit of a confrontation with the administration about the decision to call Prey ‘Prey,'” Colantonio told the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. “It made me very, very upset. I didn’t want to call this game Prey and still in front of journalists.” I had to say what I wanted. I hate to lie and these are sales lies – not a personal lie – but I still felt bad. I had to support a message I didn’t want. Not just me, no one on the team wanted to call this game Prey. Our game has nothing to do with Prey. there wasn’t, but in a way Prey[2006]looked like.”
“I’m grateful that a company gave me the tools to make a game and trust my talent with millions of dollars. But when you say ‘Your game will be called Prey’ to this artist, it’s a bit of an insult to the artist, the creative side. I don’t think it should. I think that’s a mistake.’
Colantonio stressed that the naming dispute is typical for the “corporate world” of game development. He says that naming Prey that way is not only a creative flaw, but also a commercial misconception. The name failed to generate excitement among potential players and spoiled the way fans of the 2006 game perceived the new game.
Colantonio continued, “It was also a kick to the original producers of Prey. I wanted to apologize to them over and over. We never had any intention of ‘stealing their IP’ and making it ours. That’s disgusting. “That wasn’t it. So everybody lost and [Prey’s] sales were terrible. I hate to be right in this situation, but I was right in 10 different ways that the name of the game should never have been that.”
Colantonio also said that this name dispute partly contributed to Prey’s departure from Arkane shortly after release. Because I wasn’t in control of my own boat.”
Speaking in a Noclip documentary last year, Colantonio said he worked on a sci-fi immersive simulation aboard a space station before being recruited by Arkane’s Prey IP group. This preliminary design was inspired by the studio’s first release, Arx Fatalis.
“None of these ideas were somehow something Bethesda wanted, but they wanted us to work on Prey,” Colantonio said. “So that’s how it all started.”
“We finally agreed on something like: ‘It will be able to make a different IP almost containing the same fact that the aliens were on the space station’. I guess that was the compromise because nothing else was negotiable. This game had to be Prey somehow.”
In the same interview, designer Ricardo Bare said the game didn’t have a working title before it was called Prey. The game was called Project Danielle within the studio in its early days. It was a reference to SHODAN, the artificial intelligence of Irrational Games’ 1999 game System Shock 2, which Prey saw as a major inspiration.
After leaving Arkane, Colantonio founded WolfEye Studios, which released the twin-stick immersive simulation Weird West earlier this year…
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