Bethesda forced Arkane to call its game Prey, which studio founder says was 'very, very hurtful'

pcgamer.com:

I like Arkane's 2017 immersive sim Prey(opens in new tab) a lot—even more than I liked Human Head's 2006 FPS of the same name. (Which, for the record, I liked quite a lot too.) But I was always baffled by the decision to reuse the title. Developer Arkane was explicit that its game was not a sequel or a remake, and had "no tie with the original(opens in new tab)," and it's not as though the 2006 game was such a smash hit that it carried immutable PR value.

It was a fairly widespread point of confusion, in fact, and not just among gamers but also at Arkane. In fact, studio founder Raphael Colantonio, who left Arkane(opens in new tab) in 2017, said in a recent Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences interview that Bethesda's insistence on using the name «was very, very hurtful,» and ultimately helped convince him that it was time to go.

«I did not want to call this game Prey,» Colantonio said. «I had to say I wanted to anyway in front of journalists, which is not my pleasure. I hate to lie. And those are sales lies, it's not like a personal lie or whatever, but it still felt bad that I had to support a message I did not want. Not only me, but nobody in the team wanted to call this game Prey. Our game had nothing to do with Prey.

»I'm grateful that a company will give me the means to make a game and trust my ability with so many millions of dollars, I'm grateful of that—but there is a bit of the artistic, creative side that is insulted when you tell this artist, 'Your game is going to be called Prey.' You go like, I don't think it should, I think it's a mistake. It's a sales mistake, because we're going to get the backfires from the [original Prey fans], these ones are not going to be happy, then the ones who didn't like