With the release of Sucker Punch's new PS4 Infamous reboot Second Son imminent, anticipation is growing for what's sure to be in some ways a very interesting departure – particularly aesthetically – from Cole McGrath's adventures in fictional U.S. cities in the first two games. As it turns out, the series' roots have an even more varied history, as Infamous reportedly started on conceptually as an Animal Crossing-esque title where you just happened to be a superhero. That fought purple gorillas.
It may sound like a joke, but Second Son's co-founder Chris Zimmerman revealed this bizarre factoid about the series earlier this week in an interview with Gamespot. Evidently in its original incarnation Infamous had a much bigger emphasis on social features and interacting with friends – so basically nothing like what the series is really known for now – than the comic book homage it became.
"The original idea for Infamous, believe it or not, was that it was kind of Animal Crossing, but you were a super hero," Zimmerman said in the interview. "All kinds of crazy stuff like [social features]...we worked on that for about a year in that direction. So much more stylized, much more cartoony than what you end up seeing. We worked hard to see if we could make that work."
While one of the first concepts of the game included fighting purple gorillas that were stealing ballons, one of the game's apparently numerous prototypes that never went anywhere. It raises the question of how you go from cartoon animals to realistic people, but videogames can be a weird industry.
Of course, this would have been somewhere close to the time that Sony was starting to experiment with their quickly abandoned community-based content management aesthetic in titles like LittleBigPlanet and ModNation Racers, so it's possible that might've had some indirect influence on Sucker Punch's initial ideas. Then again, just coming off Sly Cooper, it might've also seemed like a natural progression at the time.
The more you know, huh?
[Via Gamespot]
