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Activision greenlit a sequel to Neversoft’s open world Wild West shooter Gun, but it was canned by the studio due to a lack of staff, former president Joel Jewitt has revealed.
Discussing the sequel in the latest issue of Game Informer, Jewett explained that Neversoft “had a bunch of guys that fought really hard over on the Activision side and we got the sequel approved, and then we more or less had to make the call over here that we couldn’t do it for business reasons.
“We just didn’t have the manpower to make [Gun 2] and another skateboarding game,” he continued. “We had to take our engine to the next level, because we were [moving to] the Xbox 360. We had to put everybody back on the [Tony] Hawk franchises.”
Gun released on PS2, Xbox, GameCube, PC and Xbox 360 in November 2005, a month after the studio’s other project Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. The studio went on to release Tony Hawk’s Project 8 a year later and Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground in 2007. Subsequent Tony Hawk titles were developed by Robomodo as Neversoft transitiond to focus on Guitar Hero.
Despite Gun 2 failing to materialise, however, GTA 5 developer Rockstar went on to see significant success with Red Dead Redemption – its own take on the Wild West genre – five years later.
“We thought there was going to be this big demand out there [for a Wild West game],” Jewett added. “Quite frankly, I think we were right and I thank the guys at Rockstar for, in my opinion, proving us right.”
Source: Game Informer | September 2014
