Spanish game studio MercurySteam Entertainment has been making console and PC games since the early 2000s. Its credits include the failed American McGee Presents: Scrapland to the successful Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series.
Now the Madrid company cofounded by Enric Alvarez is striking out on its own with the independently created Raiders of the Broken Planet. The title is a narrative-based adventure third-person shooter game inspired by The Magnificent Seven film. You can play the game solo or with up to three other cooperative players. Or you can join the bad guys in a multiplayer session and take out four rivals at once. It’s a different kind of shooter, and it may have what it takes to survive in the cutthroat games business.
Alvarez gave a talk about the game at the Gamelab 2016 event in Barcelona. I caught up with him and interviewed him there. MercurySteam is one of Spain’s biggest game studios, with more than 100 employees. We talked about making Raiders, the rise of Spain’s game business, and the move to become an indie studio.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Enric Alvarez: We’re presenting our new game, Raiders of the Broken Planet. It’s a third-person shooter, as well as an adventure game you can play in campaign mode, solo or with up to three more players. If you feel evil you can storm into missions and play alongside the bad guys in a one-versus-four mode.
GamesBeat: So in the multiplayer, you can have an asymmetrical kind of multiplayer? Four players against one, or one against four?
Alvarez: It’s an adventure game. All the missions are very narrative-driven. We have a story arc, quite a complex one. Each mission is completely different from the others on a narrative level, gameplay level, and so on.
Essentially, you pick the mission you want to play and if you don’t feel very sociable, you can play it by yourself, you against the bad guys. You can also play with up to three other players, other Raiders, against the bad guys. But in the style of Dark Souls, you can join other people’s missions and play alongside the bad guys. And that’s always a surprise for them. They won’t know you’re there until the last second.
GamesBeat: So that can make their mission a lot harder.
Alvarez: Well, it makes it more a lot more interesting. Then you can’t trust that, “Okay, this particular enemy, it always does the same thing.” It can be a human opponent with their own tactical approach. The antagonist, let’s call them, has a lot of different ways to defeat the Raiders team. He can beat them by simply ruining their plans, or by killing them until they lose all their remaining respawns.
GamesBeat: Where did you get the idea?
Alvarez: You might not believe it, but the first idea came from the Magnificent Seven, the old western movie that was based on Seven Samurai, from Akira Kurosawa. Like in those movies, our main characters are a bunch of unlikely teammates fighting against the bad guys. But each one of them has their own interests, and there are a lot of contradictory interests between them all. It creates a lot of drama, a lot of side stories. You might like one character and hate another. But you can play as any of them.
Since we’re a story-driven game, the playable characters are more than just gameplay tools. They have their stories. They have things to say about what’s happening around them. You’re not always going to agree with them. But you’re playing an adventure the entire time. After the first mission, you’ll trigger certain events that are important to mission two and so on.
GamesBeat: What’s your own background? How long have you been making games?
Alvarez: I started back in 1999. I worked for an already-extinct developer, Rebel Act Studios. We made a hack-and-slash game called Blade: Edge of Darkness. It was like Dark Souls, but 15 years earlier. After that the company went bankrupt. A few of us decided to try something together, so we established MercurySteam in 2002.
Two years later we released our first game, Scrapland. American McGee helped us out, but the game was a total disaster. We lost every last cent. Not necessarily a big surprise for a first game. But that gave us a lot of experience. We drew some attention from publishers. We signed with Codemasters to work on Clive Barker’s Jericho, an FPS that came out in 2007.
Then we got in touch with Konami when they were interested in rebooting Castlevania. They asked us what we envisioned there. We did a pitch that they liked, and the rest is history. We did Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Castlevania: Mirror of Fate, and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2. Now we’re busy with Raiders of the Broken Planet.
GamesBeat: How many years has this project been in the works?
Alvarez: A couple of years. Technically it’s a very complex game. We’re coming from single-player experiences. This is a hybrid, something can be played single-player or multiplayer. We need to learn a lot of things. This isn’t our first multiplayer game. Scrapland had quite a nice multiplayer mode. It’s a shame nobody played it.
GamesBeat: What’s your schedule at the moment?
Alvarez: We haven’t announced a release date yet. We will as soon as we feel ready.
GamesBeat: And you’re self-publishing?
Alvarez: Yes, we are. We’re going independent. We always wanted to be able to do this, and now digital distribution is feasible for an independent developer. We’re on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
GamesBeat: How many people are in your studio now?
Alvarez: About 120 people, in Madrid.
GamesBeat: Does that make you one of the biggest Spanish game companies?
Alvarez: I think we’re the biggest, yes. The Spanish game industry, long story short, we’re better off now than we were 10 years ago. Much better. The issue isn’t talent, because there are many Spanish development staff at companies in the U.K., in the states, even in Japan. The issue is building the industry. Solidifying an industry that’s able to keep people here and keep them working in development. We’re working on it, and things are getting better.
GamesBeat: Competition is very global that way.
Alvarez: Video games have been global from day one. It’s a lesson you learn the first day you start working in this industry. You just make what kinds of games interest you. Shooters, adventures, RTS, RPG—you can’t do a local RPG. Only one country has managed to do that, which is Japan. But the culture is so different. There’s no such thing as a Spanish shooter. You just make a shooter. It’s as simple as that. You need to reach a global audience, so you can’t rely on local themes. They’ll be misunderstood or not understood at all outside of your local culture.
GamesBeat: Is there enough infrastructure grown up to support the industry here? Financing and so on?
Alvarez: That’s the weakest point. When I said we still lack an industry, I meant exactly that. We lack the investor confidence to support the industry. Even today, if you go to an investor and say, “I’m making a game. I have 15 years experience. My latest games sold millions,” they don’t trust you or understand you. It’s unusual. There isn’t a history of investors doing this kind of thing.
GamesBeat: Now that you’ve been an indie for a while now, do you plan to stay that way?
Alvarez: We’ve been indie all the time, really. Working for a publisher doesn’t make you less indie. This is something people tend to misunderstand. They think indie means small games made by a couple of guys in a garage with no money at all. You can be independent all your life. We’ve always been independent, even when we were working for Konami. We ran our own projects.
This particular project now is fully independent. We’re financing it ourselves and taking all the risk. Like you say in English, we’re balls to the wall with this.
Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.