Prey Director says Arkane was forced to use this title: “It’s gross…not what I wanted to do”
Prey director Raphaël Colantonio said developer Arkane Studios was forced to use Bethesda’s Prey name, despite their disagreement and feeling “gross” to use it.
In a speech on AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook podcast (and spotted by Kotaku), Colantonio said that using that name was disrespectful to 2006’s Prey – a completely different game developed by a completely different team and company.
“Calling Prey Prey hurt me very, very much. I didn’t want to call this game Prey, and I had to say in front of journalists that I wanted it anyway,” Colantonio said. “There’s a bit of the artistic, the creative side that gets insulted when you say to this artist, ‘You know your game? It will be called Prey.’ And you say, ‘I don’t think it should. I think it’s a mistake.’”
Calling it Prey was also detrimental to the game’s sales, Colantonio said, because fans of Prey — a first-person shooter about an ex-soldier kidnapped by aliens — protested Arkane’s game, and those who didn’t like the original didn’t do it twice would look at it.
“It was also a kick in the face for the original creators of Prey,” he continued. “I’ve wanted to apologize to them many, many times. I didn’t really have a chance because I don’t really know these people. It was never our intention to steal their IP and make it ours. It’s gross and that’s not what I wanted to do.”
Colantonio left Arkane shortly after Prey’s release in 2017, citing the naming debacle and general disagreements with management as one of the reasons. While Prey was well-received by critics and gamers – IGN said it’s great – Colantonio commented that sales were poor and the franchise had been dormant since the release of some DLC in 2018.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He’ll be talking about The Witcher all day.
https://www.ign.com/articles/prey-director-says-arkane-was-forced-to-use-that-title-its-gross-not-what-i-wanted-to-do Prey Director says Arkane was forced to use this title: “It’s gross…not what I wanted to do”
