Hotline Miami, Akira and Polish history: Reikon tells us about cyberpunk action game Ruiner

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Like many studios set up by ex-triple-A developers, Reikon was founded so that a group of game makers to exercise their creative muscles after years of working on other people’s IP. 

Initially just a small team of four, Reikon (that's ray-con) was launched by former employees of Witcher firm CD Projekt RED and Techland, best known for Dying Light and Dead Island. 

Despite these companies being titans of Polish game development, something was missing. 

“It was always someone else's ideas and we didn't have the freedom to do what we wanted; there was always someone else who knew how it was done,” narrative designer Magdalena Tomkowicz says.

“We didn't have the comfort of doing our own thing. We are passionate about other things – no more zombies, no more fantasy. So we just reached a point where there was nothing more to do. We wanted to do something that would really drive and interest us. I've always been interested in how humanity develops with technology. My father was a computer engineer, so I grew up with computers and all these weird ideas in the '80s. The guys were looking for a challenge in terms of gameplay and coding and so on. We came together and started working on it.”

The cyberpunk ‘Hotline Miami meets Akira’ Ruiner was not the first project that Reikon tried its hand at. Before landing on what would become Ruiner, the developers had ideas for an adventure title as well as a platformer project.

“The seed idea for Ruiner was something of a tower hack, like Die Hard, where the player had to outsmart the guards and so on," Tomkowicz says.

"There's a bit of that still there, but then we played Hotline Miami and loved the sense of the party and the mood that just drags you in where you're in a constant rhythm.