Postmortem: Bringing an IP back to life with horror survival game Last Year
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as implementing crossplay functionality in We Were Here Forever , how Strange Scaffold created seamless dialogue for narrative poker game Sunshine Shuffle , and o ptimizing a fully spray-painted world in Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise .
In this edition, Undaunted Games studio head and producer, Matthew Itovitch, who explains what it's been like to take on the task of acquiring and reviving a dead game and how they're negotiating its future.
When the servers for Last Year went offline in 2021, it was assumed that the game was dead and gone—but Undaunted Games brought the IP back to life for the fans, community and developers of the game. We believed that Last Year had a lot of untapped potential and wanted to give it a second chance at success. We founded the studio to do right by a team of developers who worked hard to create a good game and to do right by the community who supported that game. There are lots of successful games, and then there are games that didn't have the opportunity to succeed. Our goal was to create that opportunity.
I don’t imagine there are many studios that start their business with a fully developed and existing title. But when we acquired Last Year as a distressed asset, that was the position we found ourselves in. This act of necromancy, as one of our team members calls it, was possible because the community was very much alive—despite the game itself being dead.
A game coming back to life is rare for a
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