Ziggurat no slave to tradition
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In 1999, Infogrames published Slave Zero on PC and Dreamcast. A third-person shooter in which players controlled a giant robot blasting enemies in a futuristic cityscape, the game received lukewarm reviews, with much of the praise reserved for the simple joy of picking up and throwing cars at enemies.
Slave Zero had its fans, but there wasn't exactly a vocal contingent of gamers crying out for more, which made it surprising to say the least when, in June of 2022, Ziggurat Interactive announced it was working on Slave Zero X, a new game in the franchise developed by Poppy Works, the studio behind games like Devil Engine and Halloween Forever.
Compounding the surprise, the project was not a third-person shooter. Instead, it was a 2.5D action game in which players control not a massive mech but a distinctly person-sized character wielding a sword. The futuristic setting was similar, but the game itself looked like it may as well have been entirely unrelated to the 1999 original.
With the game launching on consoles and PC next week, Ziggurat's publishing producer Alex Lotz and marketing coordinator Cole Law explain to GamesIndustry.biz that's because at one point, it wasn't related.
"Someone at Poppyworks had this prototype going for a Shinobi-inspired game that integrated a lot of fighting game mechanics, so we sent them a list of a bunch of IPs we owned and they said, 'Oh, this would make sense in the Slave Zero world' because they were already looking at it being a sci-fi, futuristic anime setting," Lotz says.
"It did end up being much more of a hack-and-slash where the original Slave Zero was much more of a shooter, but they were very faithful to the art direction, the concept art, the themes the original was trying to tackle, the story and building out the fiction."
Lotz used to work at Tommo, which held the rights to Slave Zero before Ziggurat and released the game on Steam about a decade ago.
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