We’ve learned that two of publishing company Gamecock’s key ex-members, Mike Wilson and Harry Miller, have set up a new company for working with Croteam in publishing Serious Sam HD. Quoth Wilson, “Croteam owns the IP still since they had a G.O.D. deal, and are therefore able to work with us again on the new version”.
This is somewhat peculiar, as while Serious Sam is a great IP, Gamecock and its legacy is decidedly not; for one, most of the games the company published never really reached their goals. Take Fury, for example, which folded in the record-breaking breadth of 10 months, or Legendary, which despite its clever name, got mercilessly and uniformly clobbered in reviews.
Being the bearer of bad news is never fun, but we do finally have to report that nothing has changed since Mixnmojo learned, last February, that Crackpot Entertainment had lost their publisher for the still unreleased second part of Insecticide. The website reported that Crackpot was considering distributing cutscenes from the second episode on Youtube “in an attempt to complete the story as best they can in lieu of the actual game”, but so far only videos from the first episode have been uploaded.
Insecticide PC Cover
SouthPeak Games’ Rob Burman confirmed earlier today that Insecticide has indeed not been added to their “line-up of titles”, and Crackpot president Michael Levine did not have anything further to add to the situation (apart from a plug for Planet Cazmo). Gawrsh.
Over the course of the last few months we’ve found ourselves marvelling how very little press (apart from a slew of nichesites we frequent) and attention Crackpot Entertainment’s Insecticide has garnered.
Talk Talk
The developers, after all, consist of several nigh-luminaries of yore, responsible for much of the heyday of LucasArts Entertainment Company: Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, that sort of stuff, and with LEC now a mere shadow of its former shelf, we might quite possibly have our next best thing in the form of Insecticide.
Here’s hoping the absence of press is not a prophetic sign, as Crackpot was solely founded with the intention of developing this film noir -tinged “bi-sodic” bugfest: In a GamaSutra interview, developer Larry Ahern indeed notes that Crackpot currently has no other products in the pipeline.
The game then! What we have here is an action-adventure – 50/50 split – and seen from the 3rd person perspective, over the small shoulders of the streetsmart rookie bug-cop Chrys Liszt and narrated by the hard-boiled sleuth Roachy Caruthers. The partners are called in to investigate a murder at the Nectarola Soft Drink Company – a corporation that has an exhaustive monopoly over the city’s soft drink manufacture. As the mystery begins to unravel, these hard-shelled investigators delve deeper and deeper into the seething underbelly of the city of Troi.
