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Team17 boss Martyn Brown has told fans to ignore the critically panned Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust and instead look to its recent Worms games as evidence of what the studio can do.
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, published by Codemasters in March, was universally slated upon its release. The Xbox 360 version is currently sitting on a 25/100 Metacritic review score average.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com in an interview at the Brighton Develop conference, studio director Martyn Brown admitted that Larry “didn’t turn out great”, but denied that the fallout from the game has lead to the West Yorkshire developer losing goodwill among its fans, and dismissed concerns that the success of upcoming digital download co-op shooter Alien Breed Evolution might be affected by the saga in any way.
“I’ll be open as anything. Larry didn’t turn out great,” he said. “There are reasons why it didn’t turn out great. I’m not going to rattle on about excuses. It’s one of those things. You’re only as good as your last game. Hopefully the new Worms on LIVE Arcade, other than a couple of bugs that went unnoticed on, not our testing unit but a testing unit, which we’re fixing – I think the Metacritic on that is 84, 85 per cent.
“Certainly with Alien Breed, if anybody’s got any grumbles about what we can and can’t do, they’ll see the amount of effort and care put into a product where we’re unbridled by any nonsense we had to deal with in the Larry project.
“Yeah, hands up, it wasn’t great. At the end of the day people don’t have to buy anything. They go on reviews, they go on demos and everything else. If people make that decision that’s unfortunate. It’s not something we’re worried about.”
Team17 is ditching the traditional developer/publisher relationship for the release of Alien Breed Evolution, opting instead to self-publish the game as a digital download on XBLA, PSN and PC, starting with an XBLA timed exclusive this September or October.
“The great thing about doing the self publishing – it’s all self-funded – everything we’re risking is ours, and ours to lose,” Brown said.
“Would we have self-funded, would we have done Larry by ourselves? Would we bollocks. We wouldn’t have done that. We were making a game based on somebody else’s script, somebody else’s ideas, and it’s very difficult in that position. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and that was unfortunate.”
Need a sci-fi horror co-op shooter fix? Head over to our Alien Breed Evolution game page for relief.
