Crackdown 2 (by Rare Ltd) [Xbox 360 – Cancelled]

The first Crackdown was developed by Realtime Worlds, a company founded in 2002 by David Jones, former founder of DMA Design, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto series (that later was acquired by Rockstar). This over-the-top open world game was in development for about 5 years and finally published by Microsoft as an exclusive title for their Xbox 360in 2007. Realtime Worlds were ready to start development on a new Crackdown while they were still finishing the first one, but Microsoft were not sure about it being a profitable game (they even added a code to access the Halo 3 Beta to promote it) and were taking too much time to greenlight the second title.

After Crackdown 1 was released it became a huge success, surpassing Microsoft’s expectations. Quickly Microsoft changed their mind, wanting to publish a Crackdown sequel as soon as possible. Unfortunately at that time Realtime Worlds were too busy working on their ill-fated APB MMO and were not able to develop a new Crackdown anymore. Microsoft did not want to waste time and asked to Rare Ltd to start working on Crackdown 2.

The same team that created Kameo: Elements of Power worked on this Crackdown sequel for a few months along with other lost games as Kameo 2 and Black Widow, before Microsoft decided that Rare would have been better to create games for their Kinect add-on, boosting the casual gaming market on the Xbox 360. Crackdown 2 by Rare was then cannedand the project was given to Ruffian Games, a team formed in 2008 by… former Realtime Worlds employee.

David Jones, former Realtime Worlds CEO, in an interview with Game Industry said:

“The bottom line is that what we thought would happen is that a sequel would be done by a studio somewhere… maybe one of the internal studios, or others that they’ve worked with, and that would be the way it went forward,” […] “I think it was unfortunate that it had to be with a start-up in Dundee… it is challenging to get enough developers in one region as it is, so that was the only little big of negativity to the story.”

During an interview with Retro Gamer Magazine(issue 122) Phil Tossell, former Rare developer that contributed to the Crackdown prototype, shared some memories on the project:

“He spent several months working on an early version of Crackdown 2 and has a particular affection for Black Widow, an aborted first-person shooter featuring a spider mech and an ingenious “jump-and-gun” mechanic. […] I think we were handed a poisoned chalice,” he says, wearily. “We were being asked to make the games we’d always made for an audience that didn’t want those sort of games. The reason we did Black Widow, Crackdown and aged up Kameo was because we were trying to bridge that gap but Microsoft wouldn’t let us.”

Rare still kept a small connection with the released Crackdown 2. As written by Rare Gamer: “save data from Crackdown 2 is used to unlock the protagonist as a playable multiplayer character in Perfect Dark XBLA.”