Oddworld creator explains how success is a treadmill for game developers

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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.”

This was Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which was a hit on the PlayStation. With this project, Oddworld Inhabitants proved to GT Interactive that it was capable of producing hit games on time. This led GT, which had its initial public offering in 1995, to put even more expectations on Lanning and his team.

“The way the board of the publisher looked at it was ‘what were our biggest performers this Christmas, and who can we rely on next Christmas?’ — and I didn’t see that coming,” said Lanning. “I thought if we made a game and had success, we’d be afforded more confidence and leeway to make a better game.”

And while 1998’s Abe’s Exoddus is probably a better game than Abe’s Oddysee, Oddworld Inhabitants had to develop it under extreme conditions with very limited time. This forced Lanning to make some tough decisions about