Oddworld creator explains how success is a treadmill for game developers

In 1997, developer Oddworld Inhabitants released Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee to an enthusiastic response from PlayStation owners. Oddworld founder Lorne Lanning expected that his team’s hard work would release some of the pressure on the creative process. In an interview with Xbox Expansion Pass host Luke Lohr, Lanning said that he was wrong to make that assumption.

“I thought the success of Abe’s Oddysee was going to give us a little cushion or a little buffer,” Lanning told Lohr. “What I failed to forecast was that the exact opposite was going to happen. You’re now 50% owned by a public company that has quarterly profits it needs to make. And we were in a window where some of the biggest titles from our publisher, GT Interactive, were slipping out of the Christmas release window … but we delivered.”