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Just Cause developer Avalanche was dealt a blow last year when Xbox cancelled Contraband, a co-op smuggling game set in ’70s Southeast Asia. But it’s not the first project in the Swedish studio’s long history to be canned after years of investment and high hopes. Avalanche co-founder and former chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg has opened up about AionGuard, a beloved project of the late noughties that “would have been Crimson Desert”.
“It was exactly that,” he told PC Gamer. “I haven’t played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game.”
AionGuard comes over like a fantasy open world fever dream. You would play a sorcerer-knight, tasked with taking back the land from evil. In the conquest-focused style that Just Cause popularised—and many other developers copied—you would need to take down an enemy stronghold in every region to make progress. To achieve that goal, you might cut supply lines to weaken a base or recruit local tribes to assist in the assault.
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Not that the titular AionGuard necessarily needed much help. The player character was capable of riding dragons, freezing and shattering enormous enemies, and morphing into a 60-foot golem. The production was inspired by the liberation of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings, and Avalanche worked on it for at least two years.
“It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs,” Sundberg says. “And then they just changed business direction again and wanted to focus on their existing IPs instead of new ones. They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.”
Sundberg doesn’t name the publisher in question. But a couple of years back, a former VP of Disney Interactive Studios named Martin Alltimes told Time Extension that the House of Mouse had originally backed AionGuard. That was until Bob Iger became CEO, and the company began to turn away from gnarlier projects aimed at adults. Most notably, Disney shut down Warren Spector’s Junction Point Studios in 2013, ending the dark fantasy Epic Mickey series.
Once Disney had lost confidence in AionGuard, Avalanche bought back the rights and took the unusual step of announcing the game without a publisher. In January 2009, AionGuard graced the cover of Edge magazine and was revealed in a nine-page feature.
“For me, it was kind of a test,” Sundberg says. “Because someone told me that in Hollywood, if you have an idea for a new movie that you think is super unique, you just tell everyone about it. So everyone will back off from that idea. I tried the same thing in the games industry, and it didn’t work.”
When Avalanche attempted to pitch AionGuard to other potential backers afterwards, “every publisher just shut the door, because it was already announced,” Sundberg says. “But to me it was like, ‘What we announced, no one else can do’. We already had it working. And so that just died out silently.”
Avalanche was on a roll at the time, and so the studio was able to move the AionGuard team over to another project, named Arcardia Rising. “That was a fun, more linear but still open-world game set in an alternative steampunk London,” Sundberg says. “They were building mines under London, so the poor were getting more and more shoved down into the mines.” The game began with an adventurer recounting his deeds in a bar. “And then you just played his life story.”
Sadly, Arcadia Rising was doomed by publisher troubles too. “We delivered a great vertical slice, and then THQ announced their financial results,” Sundberg says. “It was just obvious what would happen, and it was so sad. I’m still really good friends with that team, who have moved on to other places now, and we always talk about Arcadia Rising as one of those games that deserved to be made.”
