How Puppeteer narrowly avoided cancellation
We talk to Puppeteer director Gavin Moore about Japan Studio's under-the-radar PS3 platformer, and how it almost died so The Last Guardian could live.
About a year into the development of Puppeteer, director Gavin Moore got the news he feared: Sony wanted to cancel his game.
Moore worked at Sony's Japan Studio and had been thrilled to kick off the project, a platformer inspired by Japanese theater that he conceived as something to play with his son. But Japan Studio was juggling multiple projects including The Last Guardian, a long-in-development follow-up to the critically acclaimed Shadow of the Colossus that needed staff. To make the numbers work, Sony wanted to drop the curtain on Puppeteer and move Moore's team over to the higher-profile game down the hall.
Fortunately for Moore, the story didn't end there. He was able to convince the company to continue operations with a smaller team, though doing so wasn't without its trade-offs. He spent the next year managing 15 developers as opposed to around 70.
"We were on one end of the 14th floor, and The Last Guardian was on the other end," Moore says. "The teams used to meet in the middle, and then suddenly, we were crammed into just literally one tiny end of the 14th floor of this massive skyscraper in Tokyo. It was an open-plan office, so I could see all the people I used to work with working on something else every day."
13 years after the release of Puppeteer, I spoke with Moore about working alongside the Last Guardian team, the ups and downs of Puppeteer's development, and working for a Sony quite different from the one of today.