Announced today at Gamescom, Revenge of the Savage Planet almost didn’t exist. The newly formed Raccoon Logic is made up of developers from Typhoon – the studio responsible for Journey to the Savage Planet – but the team’s path from 2020 to this surprise sequel has been a turbulent one, to say the least.
Typhoon Studios was founded in 2017, acquired by Google in 2019, and shuttered in 2021. Following the closure, it seemed like the budding action-adventure game series that began with Journey to the Savage Planet had come to an abrupt end. But things took a turn when studio founders Reid Schneider and Alex Hutchinson reacquired the rights to the IP to continue working on its sequel – the aptly named Revenge of the Savage Planet.
During a press briefing at the Raccoon Logic Montreal office, Schneider explains that Typhoon was born in 2017 out of a desire to “get back to the craft of making games.” With developers coming from the likes of Ubisoft and EA, where hyper-specialization had become a problem – Hutchinson recalls “there was a guy whose job it was to just paint grass!” – the 25-person team was formed to occupy the space between indie games and big-budget, triple-A titles. “We want to make finishable, unique experiences that don’t outstay their welcome,” Schneider explains.
It was also important to the team to make games sustainably, which meant avoiding the games-as-a-service model. Schneider says being asked to create a game designed to be played for thousands of hours felt “terrifying” when he worked at triple-A studios.
“I always feel like I’m playing Battlefield wrong because I don’t have 63 close friends to play with on the same day at the same time,” Hutchinson laughs. “But everyone can always find one person to play a game with.” Similarly, asking its player base to commit hundreds of hours to the Savage Planet games never felt plausible. “When I see I’ve played for 400 hours, I feel sad!” Hutchinson continues, “I don’t think ‘This is great!’ I think, ‘No! I could have learned Spanish!’”
This aim of creating smaller games worked well with Journey to the Savage Planet, which earned “at least” four million players. “It’s hard for us to know the exact amount, because 505 [Games] published the first one, then Google bought it and published the Employee of the Month edition. We can’t get all the data from it, but we knew the last time we saw it who’s in there,” Hutchinson explains.
Google published the Employee of the Month edition on the same day the team was notified of Stadia Games and Entertainment’s closure, leading to mass redundancies. “We were acquired by Google and we thought, ‘Alright, it’s fun working for a first party and we have access to technology,’ and all of that seemed like something none of us had done [before],” explains Schneider. “The day we were acquired, the pandemic broke out so we never set foot inside a Google office. The day we shipped the first, last, and only game Google ever paid for internally, they made us redundant,” Hutchinson recalls.
Schneider explains that making games and working for a company whose primary business is not games meant they were “kind of fucked.” Hutchinson claims that “[Google said] ‘You need to make a game that 100% of people like,’ and we were like, ‘Oh, dear.’” According to the team, Google expected them to pitch games that were only possible in the Cloud. “It was like saying, ‘Here at Netflix we only make TV shows that couldn’t be on any other form of TV,’ and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what that is!’ It was very strange.”
Hutchinson claims that Google expected the 25-person team to accomplish goals they’d formerly achieved within teams of 600 people. “We’re like, ‘Okay, we can do this, but you need to let us hire’” but “they said, ‘No, if you make the game and it’s great with 25 people then we’ll let you hire 500 artists.’ That’s not how it works!” Hutchinson likens it to pitching for a TV show by shooting a pilot with no actors and hiring them at a later date. “Everything you want us to do, we can’t do, so we’ll just keep working on [the sequel]. They were very confused, so we asked what to do and they were like, ‘Make Star Wars,’ and we can’t make Star Wars!” he laughs.
“It was very difficult,” he continues, “They were saying that 100% of people need to like it. You’re like, ‘God, this is not possible!” and they’re like, ‘But everyone loves Google Maps.’ Nobody loves Google Maps. Everyone thinks it is a map, you know?! It tells you where your house is, but I don’t love the map. Who loves maps?!”
Despite its turbulent experience with Google, the team wasn’t finished making games and instead entered into negotiations to reacquire the source code and IP. “It actually took longer to buy it back than it did to sell the company,” Schneider explains. “Google’s used to buying stuff, but it’s not used to giving it back.”
After successfully reacquiring the Savage Planet IP, the team tentatively started working on the sequel in the newly formed Raccoon Logic studio. “It was galvanizing because everyone wanted to go again,” explains Schneider. It seemed to be a unanimous decision that a sequel, rather than a new IP, was the right way to go. “We felt like we had a lot more to say and do with [Journey to the Savage Planet]. The fantasy is that if we sell enough we’ll do a new IP next using the same code base, so we can skip a lot of the hard yards of just getting it to load and getting the menu up,” Hutchinson says. Schneider echoes this: “Once you have one game out, the foundation stays there, and we have hundreds of ideas on how we could have improved on that one. The first sequel is your reward.”
Raccoon Logic certainly has a story to tell. It’s therefore no surprise that when Revenge of the Savage Planet’s brightly colored world loads in front of me, I’m immediately faced with a transmission message. The protagonist’s employer from the original game, Kindred Aerospace, has just been acquired by a corporation known as Alta Interglobal, and you’ve been sent on a mission into deep space. Because of the way space travel works in the Savage Planet universe, this takes 100 years. Sadly, shortly after departure, your new parent company realizes that space exploration is difficult and expensive, leading them to abandon this pursuit. By the time you arrive on your destination planet in deep space, you’ve already been made redundant, everyone who fired you has been dead for 50 years, and the in-game email system contains only two messages – one congratulating you on your mission, and the other telling you you’re fired.
There’s no disguising that the intro is a direct, joking reflection of Raccoon Logic’s Google experience. Hutchinson and Schneider both agree that the game “wouldn’t exist” in its current state without that history. But they didn’t create Revenge of the Savage Planet out of malice. Rather, everyone at the studio is positive, excited, and ready to deliver a great sequel.
The most notable change is the shift to a third-person perspective. Schneider jokes that it’s to appease the studio’s animation team, saying “there are only so many things you can do with a pair of hands!” From a player perspective, this opens the game up to new possibilities and allows for some extra humor. The movement of your deliberately non-binary character is almost slapstick as their limbs flail while they sprint across a slippery puddle of goo. You can find cosmetics and unlockables that take light, “legally distinct” inspiration from the likes of Star Wars, Power Rangers, and more.
There are also now “four-and-a-half” planets, with the fifth only fully unlocked after completing the game’s story. There are loads more animals and plants to scan, plus new gear, including a lasso that doubles as a whip and a gun. You also get access to a new, fully customizable base, with the ironic twist that you can only purchase upgrades from the corporation’s store using its own currency. Co-op returns, too, with online and split-screen play.
“We’re trying to allow as much player expressivity as possible,” Hutchinson explains. “The fantasy would be that, in a Metroidvania game, there’s one lock with one key. In ours, there’s one lock with many keys.” In other words, you don’t need to cause a specific type of explosion to blow a cracked wall or floor open – any blast will do. There’s a green gun that creates a slippery goo, and when creatures interact with it, they’ll comedically slide around in an attempt to get away. You can use that to your advantage to create various traps – spray the goo gun on the ground and they’ll slide into a spiked barrier or off the edge of a cliff. This green goo is also highly flammable, so if you’re shooting it and your co-op partner chooses to ignite it, you’ve suddenly got a very dangerous but very funny makeshift flamethrower.
After huge demand, you can now capture creatures in non-violent ways. “Admittedly, I guess they just become slaves,” laughs Hutchinson. “They’re trapped in your home, but at the same time, they love it. They’re happy to be here!” You can also research them and develop different rarities.
Raccoon’s experience with Google has laid the foundation for what seems to be a funny, stylish, and chaotic space game. The team has chosen to self-publish the sequel and aims to release it in the first half of 2025. With the plethora of neat new additions and the option to kick back and explore without difficulty checks or demanding gameplay, I’m very much looking forward to Revenge of the Planet and hopeful that we’ll see the return of the original’s excellent photo mode.