Advent Rising - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] okay listen up 2005's advent rising was one of the first games that appeared in the most spacious well-lit hallways of my mind palace whenever i thought of potential what happened subjects over the years though i've started to get more pleasure of not talking about it rather than talking about it because whenever i decided to pull the trigger i'd look over footage of the game and i'd see so many grey hallways enemy designs and ridiculous amounts of awkward flipping yes there are certainly some elements to its developmental history that are tailor made for this show but they're never about the game itself but rather it's clown shoes marketing campaign or it's misplaced over ambition in trying to become the next star wars but i've delayed this long enough and thanks to anthony down at the flophouse vip patreon i am now compelled to finally bag my white space whale after avoiding it for oh so long this is the story of a long gestating childhood dream a meticulous master plan and not enough money to make it all happen it then resulted in a franchise that died before it barely even got started and as a bonus caused the destruction and near destruction of several different companies with all of that out on the table just what happened to advent rising here we go let's start this off right with a quote from an mtv interview with the game's director lead designer and space captain one donald mustard space captain face uh-huh give her a second it's the guy from fortnite advent is just the first of my plots to unleash upon the world and it's the least awesome of my stuff he said that anyway donald and his brother jeremy spent their youth dreaming up sci-fi universes and various other space operas which inspired them to get into filmmaking but it was an obscure playstation rpg called a final story 7 that showed them just what the medium of video games could do its rich steampunk fantasy setting combined with cutting-edge cgi cutscenes was all it took to convince the duo to eventually study silicon graphics rendering in college which then landed them jobs and venerated video game development studio glyph x never heard of glyphx well there's a reason for that and it's because i lied to you about five seconds ago this guy's got some balls gliffex specialized in making marketing images and box art for video games not the games themselves to their credit though they did put together some absolute bangers in the early 2000s such as [Music] gliffex consisted of like three employees with two of them being the mustard brothers but it wasn't long before donald had convinced everyone to start drafting out concept art and materials for one of his fan fics that he called advent rising meanwhile gleffex branched out into creating fmv cutscenes for games like soldier of fortune 2 and downhill domination today we're going to be looking at one of the deadliest creatures of the sea the great white pointer it was around then that the brothers had the rough idea for the game mapped out and contacted orson scott card the writer of such sci-fi fair as ender's game to help them hammer out a script while the main ideas characters and broader strokes were all handled by donald the actual character dialogue would fall to mr card who had accepted the offer with him on board they sought a publisher to bankroll the whole project but because they had zero experience and were pitching a trilogy with various tie-in novels comics and tons of other crap they received a huge variety of rejections from across the industry after a solid year of this though their 27th choice of publisher majesco finally said yes ah majesco hey company deserving of their own dedicated what happened that i'm sure i'm gonna also avoid doing for years now while jesco tended to publish just about anything and everything they could get their hands on what they did lack was their own aaa franchise their own marketable doom zelda or resident evil so the idea of actually finally owning one had a certain appeal interesting that you would infer that the problem was though that they couldn't really afford to they were only able to hire 12 other employees who were then added to the glefex team compared to the hundreds hired to work on things like halo or splinter cell this was because a huge allocation of the budget was being reserved for marketing while a paltry 4 million dollars went into the actual development when you consider what they were attempting to do craft a big sci-fi world lots of cutscenes dialogue vehicle sections and an xbox and pc version well it's no surprise that this game is now on what happened but how did the tiny team manage to actually pull this off well mustard said it best with we just bled through our eyes which isn't something to brag about dude i mean have you ever even seen the show before yes what followed over the game's 28th month development period was long hours crunch long hours and even more crunchy hours that were long this did result in some innovations like very few actual load times the ability to pause its lengthy cutscenes and something it called flick targeting which they were hopeful would change the way gamers aimed in third person shooters it did no such thing so obviously these factors an inexperienced team taking on an ambitious action adventure as their first game limited with a small budget and short time period by their publisher was always going to be a stressful rushed affair not only that mr mustard was also busy with satellite projects that were surrounding the generic world of advent rising which included future games now when you're designing something movie game you know whatever you still want to make it feel self-contained to be fulfilling and robust on its own yes it is possible to create part 1 in a continuing narrative but it's still always a massive risk in which to do so and advent rising was a massive risk many characters bits of lore and plotlines were not fleshed out because they would be in later games or other media this included the first chapter's ending which was left hanging on a massive cliff if you did want more lore and backstory well you would just need to buy the comic donald mustard had partnered up with a former marvel comics bigwig to produce a prequel whose sole purpose was to flesh out specific characters orson scott card was also initially in talks to pen a full novel as well and none of this was jessico's idea by the way it all came from the mind of mustard to make a media empire first and a video game second and nothing exemplifies this more than an interview with cbr around the game's launch at its core i am a storyteller and we are very interested in telling great stories when we sat down and began to lay out the universe for advent we came up with much much more story than we could ever tell in a video game we planned from day one to build this story as a franchise to have the video game but also have the companion books movies and comic books in my opinion the comic book is really where this story starts the story in the comic starts over 10 years before the events of the game if things go as planned we've got a lot more story to tell before we'll ever get to where the game starts i think that's such a cool thing that we can use all these different mediums to tell this big rich story now it's it's fine to use other mediums to supplement your universe with non-essential storytelling like a mass effect dead space or bloodborne but when you start trying to spread it across multiple mediums all at once right off the bat not one thing gets the attention it needs case in point mr mustard's next quote with advent you get something that has always been designed as a big epic story with a very defined beginning middle and end that stretches through a whole lot of different mediums of storytelling i think with the comic you're actually seeing the broadest vision of the story that you'll ever be able to experience in the sense that it starts where we want the story to start and it'll go and go until it ends that's something we're trying to capitalize on and it's something we always intended my hope is that very soon hopefully only a few years from now people will ask if that's the video game based on the comic or the comic based on the book etc i want people to be confused about where its origins are because it's just a good story oh my god [ __ ] legendary anyway with all of you reeling from that quote struggling to get back onto your feet it's time to discuss the thing that advent rising is most famous for right on the box yeah right there it claims that you can win a million dollars with more info on the back this contest which was dubbed the race to save humanity amounted to a series of symbols players were tasked with scouring the game world for the first player that managed to find them all would then be a million dollars richer but and this was a big but in 2005 confirming and receiving entries for this contest wasn't exactly possible even though majesco and glf x had implemented these symbols and and printed the game boxes promoting it they hadn't really had the time to consider whether it was even logistically feasible how were fans supposed to prove their accomplishment how can we stop people from cheating should they rely on emails or physical letters did majesco even have a million dollars just lying around so despite the game releasing in late may early june of 2005 the contest was officially cancelled that very august with a somber press release acknowledging all the embarrassment after careful assessment of the technical issues identified with the advent rising race to save humanity contest majesco entertainment and xbox live had determined there'd be no technically feasible solution that would allow the contest to continue in a fair and secure manner as such we apologize for any inconvenience but we must unfortunately cancel the contest however as consolation majesco entertainment has set up a program in which contest participants can receive two free majesco entertainment games for the xbox video game console some people have theorized that the entire contest was just a marketing stunt and that they never intended to pay the money out okay that doesn't feel good regardless to grab these free games you had to send majesco a bunch of information and proof of purchase to nab either bloodrayne 2 psychonauts raises hell guilty gear x2 and phantom dust muscle of 46 weeks per degree must be 17 years older for love too make no mistake this absolute cluster is advent rising's legacy equaled only by how unfinished the narrative is while exact sales numbers are not known they were low enough that it greatly hurt magesco as they had spent untold millions on marketing and trailers some of you out there most likely liam probably remembered seeing an advert for it in theaters in front of revenge of the sith no less which couldn't have been cheap what also contributed to the low sales were the mediocre reviews praise was given to the shooting mechanics the ambitious narrative and the game's operatic score which was produced by tommy talarico who's been in the news quite recently see you soon tommy however advent rising's negatives bland graphics forgettable characters stilted dialogue excuse me mum but i can't kill him if you're in the way and a complete lack of polish and numerous bugs were enough to send it to a one-way trip to the bargain bin to its credit the pc version which arrived a month later benefited from extra time and less bugs and is seen as the definitive version the comic book which launched in october and started off as a prequel evolved over the course of the next year and even though it lasted only five issues tried to resolve some story threads left by the game's unresolved ending the novel was also cancelled as well as a psp side story spin-off called advent's shadow which i didn't even know existed before making this video try not to be shocked but it didn't get very far into development before majesco pulled the plug speaking of magesco in the wake of advent rising's failure they kinda died lived and then lived again in a weird state of undeath for decades and honestly i'm not even sure if they still publish games i mean i don't think so but you know i could be wrong orson scott card for his part would go on to be a miserable homophobe but not before having a narrative credit on donald mustard's next big venture in 2006 with the advent rising ip being locked up at majesco mustard founded chair yes that chair and would go on to make shadow complex and eventually the infinity blade series this at least showed that he had learned something from advent rising opting for much smaller scale focused games that didn't try to be more than what they were eventually chair was acquired by epic games and were then shoved deep into the fortnite mines from which they have never returned nowadays advent rising is remembered as that one big game that was released during the transitional period between the sixth and seventh generation of consoles where ambition was vastly outpacing budget and time and and of course the the contest everyone kind of remembers the contest there is a chance though that the advent i don't know could rise once again in 2020 ziggurat software announced they had acquired several ips from majesco in a going out of business fire sale i imagine this included raises hell blood rain and yes advent rising and unlike a lot of similar we have the rights to this ipnow stories ziggurat has actually made good on their acquisition in the last year they've released modern remasters of bloodway bloodwayne in the last year they've released modern remasters of bloodrayne 1 and 2 on pc with betrayal coming down the line so it's certainly possible that in the future someone out there could still save humanity and win that million dollars that majesco so cruelly denied us all but i still kind of doubt it if you know of any other sci-fi universes that famously crashed and burn no i don't really want to talk about battlefield earth right now let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or take a spaceship ride to the flophouse vip patreon and become a big boss and nominate the subject you'd like to see next see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 183,173

Rating: 4.9341245 out of 5

Keywords: Matt McMuscles, What Happened?, wha happun, Advent Rising, What Happened Advent Rising, Video Game Documentaries, Video Game Disasters

Id: MzFYfAblx1E

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LABS_Games]

Does anyone remember getting hyped like crazy for this game during the G4TV days? For whatever reason, I vividly remember Vic Lucas and Tommy Tallarico giving this game a great review, especially praising the music and audio. Even after quickly mentioning that Tallarico was the guy responsible for the audio.

Man, teenage me really thought this game was gonna be the next Halo.

[u/CaptainMcAnus]

If anyone is curious Mandalore Gaming went into detail about the gameplay specifics if you want to know what it plays like.

[u/Richard__Rahl]

This game is towards the top of my most disappointed that the series got cancelled list. Yeah the game was janky as fuck in a lot of ways, but the story and world building very much had me wanting to see the rest of the planned trilogy.

[u/AwesomeX121189]

I remember this being billed as basically mass effect before mass effect. Things were going to carry over based on save data automatically like skill and story choices

[u/alfa_metroid]

I wish he made one about Mega Man X6, because there may be so many things to talk about... how Capcom greenlighted it without Inafune knowing, what was behind the terrible design decisions and crappy bosses, and the awful translation.

[u/GrandWings]

I was sooooooooo stoked for this game back in the day, and I enjoyed it quite a bit for the entire afternoon that it took me to beat it.

[u/[deleted]]

Took off about as well as the Ender's Game film franchise. Orson Scott Card's style of dialogue only works in written form.

[u/HaruhiJedi]

Control is the best successor to Advent Rising. I hope that Control has numerous sequels and that they are good games with more powers such as bullet-time, plasmakinesis, cryokinesis ...