Avalanche Studio’s founder Christofer Sundberg has taken to X to express his discontent about recent quotes from Mad Max director George Miller.
Yesterday, PC Gamer published an article about Miller and the director wanting Hideo Kojima to make a proper Mad Max game. In addition, the director revealed that he wasn’t that happy with 2015’s Mad Max game from developer Avalanche. “We’ve been asked many many times to do one”, Miller said. “It wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, it wasn’t in our hands, we gave all our material to a company to do it… but I’m one of those people that I’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at least try to make it at the highest level.”
After the publication of this article, Sundberg was quick to respond on X, saying that Miller’s words show “complete arrogance”. “This is complete nonsense and just shows complete arrogance”, the Avalanche founder wrote on X. “They did everything they could to make this a complete linear game after having signed up with a developer of open-world games. I’m sure Hideo Kojima would make an awesome Mad Max game, but it would be a completely different experience.”
He continued, “After the first year of development they realized that they had forced us to make a linear experience rather than the open world game we pitched. We threw away a year of work and got to hear that “players wants autonomy in this day and age”. Well, no shit…”
Sundberg is referring to publisher Warner Bros., which, apparently, insisted that Mad Max was released alongside Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. In addition, Sundberg revealed that the team had “awesome DLC” sitting to be released, but following bad sales of the game, these DLCs were canceled.
He said, “As we were forced to release Mad Max on the same day as MGS, they blamed us for the bad sales and cancelled a bunch of awesome DLC that was just sitting there waiting to be released.”
In all honesty, the 2015 Mad Max game is a highly underrated title that deserves praise. For those interested, it can be picked up pretty cheap on PC and consoles right now. Here’s what we wrote about the 2015 title in our launch review back then:
It’s still a game I really, truly enjoy. The open world may not be the most interesting, the characters may not be all that memorable, and the quests might not exactly be inspired, but this is a very competent game made by an obviously talented team of developers (Avalanche Studios; you know them for Just Cause) and they honestly blew my expectations for a Mad Max game out of the water. My gripes ultimately feel minor, because the game as a whole is very satisfying and fun to play, save for a few of those more menial challenges.
