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Brett walker lost wolves review1/7/2023 Western gamers have been unknowingly playing Chinese-produced content for quite a while now, but the people working here were stuck having to work for an outsource shop where they don’t get a lot of creative control. “About nine to 10 years ago I first started coming to China, and I immediately saw a really unique opportunity that it seemed no one else had noticed. Chinese nationals hold most of the other key positions, says McGee. Creative director Ben Kerslake and art director Ken Wong both hail from Australia. Working with McGee is chief operating officer and fellow US expat RJ Berg. “So an opportunity came up to move to Hong Kong, and I thought, ‘eh, close enough.’ I made that move knowing that the project I was going there for was a bad one, but that it was an opportunity to get out of the States, and to move to a new space.” “I passed up an opportunity to move to Japan back in the Alice era 12 years ago, and I always regretted that,” says McGee, who previously worked for id Software and Electronic Arts. I made that move knowing that the project I was going there for was a bad one. Perhaps despite his unusually patriotic first name, American McGee says he fell in love with the idea of living outside the United States, and particularly with the idea of living in Asia. In more ways than one, Spicy Horse is well positioned to manage the convergence of Eastern and Western folklore in Akaneiro. It doesn’t break much new ground insofar as the dynamics that define the action-RPG genre, but aesthetically, it is quintessential American McGee, and a loud positioning statement by the Shanghai-based studio about its future, and the future of the wider industry. It’s a self-published cross-platform PC and tablet game by Spicy Horse, a studio known best for its warped videogame revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Currently in beta, Akaneiro is Little Red Riding Hood meets feudal Japan. It’s precisely for these reasons that Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is so interesting. As videogame production and marketing costs toe the red line, any risk becomes that much riskier. That would explain the glut of me-too MMOs and shooters at least, and the frequent lack of innovation in many boxed products. The clear problem is that by its nature, market research can only tell us what has been successful, and the extrapolations on what could be successful in the future are rather narrow. The organisation of the games industry almost demands it: studios must pitch projects that publishers are prepared to invest in, and what publishers are prepared to invest in is usually determined by market research. There are plenty of games that demonstrate how publishers are thinking. Very few games really echo the conditions and the mood of the studio in which they were created, or aggressively demonstrate how a studio is thinking, where it has come from, and where it’s going. Not in an autobiographical sense, of course, but in an allegorical sense. It’s strange that so few games reflect their creators’ own stories.
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