'Surprise and delight'? No, 2K's Hangar 13 studio wants to "surprise and disrupt"

pcgamesinsider.biz:

One of the common motivational mantras you may have heard time and time again from developers is: "You are only as good as your last game."

If that was the case for Hangar 13, it's likely that the studio that wouldn't still be around. That's not us being harsh either; president and chief creative officer Haden Blackman admits just that to PCGamesInsider.biz when we spoke with him at Develop:Brighton 2019, saying that the review scores for 2016's Mafia III weren't great and if it wasn't for the faith his studio's parent companies Take-Two and 2K had in the team, it might have been curtains for the outfit.

"If we're being totally blunt, if we're only as good as our last game, I don't know that Hangar 13 would still exist because the review scores for Mafia III weren't as high as we wanted them to be," he says.

"There were lots of different reasons for that. Some are justified and some maybe weren't, but the fact that we shipped a challenging - both from a cultural and narrative standpoint - earned us some credibility moving forward. I never feel that if we fail a milestone tomorrow, we're going to be shut down. Every milestone is an opportunity for us to build more trust and more credibility with Take-Two and 2K. But at the end of the day, what's most important is that we are building that faith and that trust and that confidence internally.

"We've hired a tonne of people in this last year as every milestone gets delivered. The team looks at it and goes: 'Oh wow, we did that?' and they get more confident about the next one. That's ultimately the thing that's most important to me; that the team is delivering for itself and that we know we're on the right trajectory."

It's a good thing that Hangar 13's parent companies see