Arkane Studios Founder Raphael Colantonio announced that there were many problems with the name selection of the Prey, which was published in 2017. In a speech five years after the game’s launch, Colantonio said that not only players and the team did not accept this name, but Bethesda forced them.
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Acquired by Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax Media, in August 2010, Arkane Studios has produced many games under Bethesda. Bethesda introduced Prey at the E3 event in 2016 and launched about a year later. Just after it was introduced, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio had this to say about the game:
“Prey is not a sequel, it’s not a remake, it has no tie with the original. You have to look at it like a re-imagining of the IP.”
The game was released in May 2017, and just after that, in June, Colantonio announced his walk-out. He explained that the reason for leaving the company was to spend more time with his son and to plan his future goals.
After many years of silence, Colantonio said in an interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences recently that Bethesda’s insistence on using the name was “very, very hurtful” and made him confident about leaving. He also added the following explanations:
“I did not want to call this game Prey. I had to say I wanted to anyway in front of journalists, which is not my pleasure. I hate to lie. And those are sales lies, it’s not like a personal lie or whatever, but it still felt bad that I had to support a message I did not want. Not only me, but nobody in the team wanted to call this game Prey. Our game had nothing to do with Prey.
Throughout his interview, Colantonio expressed all his dissatisfaction with the title. He added that he often wanted to apologize to the original game’s developers.
Raphael Colantonio, who founded WolfEye Studios with Julien Roby in November 2019, has been running his experience for WolfEye ever since. Developed by the studio, Weird West is published by Devolver Digital, the distributor of many popular indie games. The game has pretty good ratings and returns today.
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