Over the past few weeks, there have been rumblings of a Saints Row revival by series creator Chris Stockman. While it’s unknown just how viable a return to the world of the open-world crime series is nowadays, it certainly seems that the series has a second chance at life following the closure of original developer Volition.
Nowadays, even in death, Saints Row is still number two in the genre to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, something its creator is very proud of. However, at the time when the game was just set to release, the series was filling a gap left by Rockstar’s even-then juggernaut series, and Stockman believes that’s the only time it ever could’ve launched.
Speaking to FRVR, Stockman explained that Saints Row simply wouldn’t have survived if the team at Volition didn’t beat Rockstar to the punch. Launching before GTA 4, the game was the first game of its ilk on the shiny new HD Xbox 360, and launching first was the only chance the series had to be as big as it was.
“No,” Stockman replied when asked if the series would’ve still taken off if GTA 4 had already launched. “No, no, no, no. Look, I’m very pragmatic person. One of the key successes, and the reason why that game was successful, was because the fortunate timing of when it launched.”
Stockman explained that early onto in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle “there was no competition, really, for your gaming dollar on a platform that was starting to spread like wildfire”. Digital storefronts didn’t exist for full releases, free-to-play didn’t exist, and developers were still learning how to make games for HD machines—something that Japanese studios famously struggled with for the entire generation.
“It launched in August, well before the Christmas rush… It was not a launch title, thank God, it didn’t compete with Oblivion and it didn’t have to compete with Gears of War, which came out like three months later,” Stockman said. “So it hit that entire window and there was no next gen open-world game. And it wasn’t this visual tour de force… but it had enough of those next-gen things that you’d never seen before. It had real-time day night cycles… the cars exploded in spectacular fashion, real-time deformation and all the little pieces, and the gameplay was good enough.”
It also helped that Saints Row was the first GTA-like to have good controls, something which the PS2-era Rockstar games famously struggled with. It also had multiplayer “that GTA didn’t have at all”, but Rockstar was working on for GTA 4. Everything came together like lightning in a bottle and—while Stockman doesn’t believe the game to be some sort of masterpiece—it was a pretty great game that was different enough and shiny enough that it could make a splash.
“I think there was enough differentiating factors [like character customisation] that allowed it to reach where it needed to go, to breakthrough,” Stockman said. “But, yeah, the design? Dude, I took it wholesale. There was that air of familiarity there like ‘am I playing a GTA game? No! But I kinda feel like I am.’ That was intentional, entirely intentional”.
“It wasn’t this visual tour de force… but it had enough of those next-gen things that you’d never seen before.”
Saints Row designer Chris Stockman
Even though the Saints Row series is now a beloved memory of the mid-2000s, Stockman and the team at Volition were lambasted for their game which many simply labelled a rip-off of Rockstar’s work despite the effort put into it. “I got sh*t for it, my friend, I got so much sh*t for it,” Stockman said.”
At the end of the day, releasing any game is a challenge, but sometimes the nature of that release is just as important as the work that goes into making the game. Nintendo famously sits on games waiting for the perfect release window, and some fantastic games never get their chance in the spotlight. Saints Row did it, even if the game was largely derivative of other works, and it created a series that lasted until it killed itself.
