GDC 09: The City of Metronome: Still Ticking, Despite a Troubled Past
Game makers spend exorbitant amounts of money to promote their finest titles and products at major events like E3 and GDC, but the games that often resonate the most with audiences are those that are allowed to speak for themselves.
Sweden’s Tarsier Studios learned this fact at E3 2005 with the debut of its action-adventure game, The City of Metronome. The team released a handful of screenshots, a brief teaser trailer, and a scant few details, but gamers nonetheless took notice of the title amidst the barrage of major Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo “Revolution” announcements.
Since then, The City of Metronome has lingered in a kind of development purgatory, neither cancelled nor in production. And even though Tarsier hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with new details on the game or its development status, neither the team nor its fans have ever given up on it.
“We always have plans to go forward, but the thing we’ve never done is to say we’re actually doing it,” said Tarsier CEO Mattias Nygren in an interview held at the W Hotel in San Francisco. “But as of right now, it’s not in production.”
The online fan reaction toward the game has nonetheless remained ardent. “We’ve never had any good chance to thank the fans, that silent community that loves The City of Metronome. Since we showed it at E3 2005, we’ve had so many emails asking ‘when is it coming?’ We’ve answered everybody we could. We’ve been as honest as we could about it. We never wanted to give anyone any false assumptions.”
One look at a screenshot of Metronome on its official site and it’s easy to understand why so many fans are still pounding on Tarsier’s door. Visitors have ogled over a dark, fantastical city where impish creatures and brooding mechanical beasts run amuck. Tarsier even hinted at the prospect of the sound design playing a major role in the gameplay, sending proponents of experimental game design into a frenzy.
Back at E3 2005, the team wasn’t particularly far into the game’s production. “We showed some of the basics of the gameplay. And we showed the setting and the mood and the world. And that’s what moved people. Everyone had their own picture of what the game would be and we just found there were so many people who wanted to see it.”
Gamers had their interest piqued and publishers in attendance at the LA Convention Center seemed supportive, but Tarsier was unable to sell the project. For one, there was a consensus at the time that the adventure genre was dead. Even though the game was meant to be action-adventure, which the team tried its best to communicate, publishers were still apprehensive.
“Our timing wasn’t the best,” Nygren admitted. “We showed it at a time when ‘next-gen’ was the word and at that point, the team was completely new—just nine people,” the CEO continued.
The game’s huge scope may have been a turn-off for some potential publishers. “We had a lot of initial thoughts that might have scared some people off. Some people thought it was going to be too complicated, using the sound or using the music. That was never our intention.” Nygren recalled one particular gameplay segment that was demoed at the time: The player recorded and played back a lullaby to a city guard on the brink of dozing off to sleep in order to sneak past him undetected.
The team has aggressively sought publishers for the game ever since its premiere and continues to do so. “I think at one point or another, we’ve pitched it to everybody,” Nygren said with a laugh. “It’s always hard as a small developer to hear from publishers, ‘Can you come back when you have a little more done? Come back next year?’” One publisher even admitted that while the game wasn’t for “them or their market,” it did provide Tarsier with ten pages of feedback, a testament to how inspirational Metronome is to all those who see it.
There was a time when Tarsier even considered self-publishing through a digital distribution or platform delivery system. Yet the problem of funding persisted. “We looked at it as, if not an AAA title, at least a very big title. We even considered doing an episodic release of it, but there was so much we needed to do upfront for all the basic systems.” The cost of development was prohibitively expensive for the fledgling studio.
Tarsier enjoyed a bit of luck in late 2007, when it received 600,000 Danish Krones from the Nordic Game Program, an institution that provides grants to regional video game developers. “That gave us the opportunity and the money to keep on prototyping the gameplay,” said Nygren. He hopes that the team will have more time and resources this year to continue to refine Metronome’s gameplay and demo it to certain publishers.
Although Nygren does not believe the potentiality for The City of Metronome’s release to be contingent upon the commercial success of Tarsier’s upcoming PlayStation Network title, Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic, he acknowledged that developing their first major title for release has “given us a lot of experience that we didn’t have before.”
Despite the setbacks, Tarsier remains optimistic about the future of its game. For them, it’s not a matter of “if” Metronome will be released. It’s a matter of “when.”
“We have a lot of plans for City of Metronome…we’ve never given up on the project. I’m just waiting for the day that we can let on that we’re seriously working on this again,” Nygren said with a smile.
“We’re all really looking forward to that day.”
