The making of Prodigal Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 by Pseudo Interactive

The making of Prodigal Xbox 360/PlayStation 3: When Pseudo Interactive merged Need For Speed and Devil May Cry

Prodigal (Xbox 360/PS3), produced by Pseudo Interactive, is part of the effort to preserve Vectorman Playstation 2 and the studio's achievements: [The transition from 2D to 3D of our best friend the SEGA robot]

Prodigal was, at the time, a next-generation game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 from Pseudo Interactive (PI), a Canadian development studio renowned for its expertise in video game physics, its “Pseudo Physics” engine and its vehicle-based productions such as Full Auto. This promising project subtly combined car racing and action/adventure phases, interspersed with QTEs (Quick Time Events; contextual gameplay elements during a cinematic which require a player to perform an action within an allotted amount of time).

Tragically, Prodigal never saw the light of day as the Toronto studio closed down in 2008. Yet everyone at PI knew they had a game with considerable potential. But even with an extremely well-executed and fully playable prototype that was without the usual smoke and mirrors involved in prototyping stages (which is the Demo featured in the video on this page, no less) no publisher, from SEGA to EA, wanted to take the risk of investing in a video game dealing with the “Supernatural”, an unsellable theme at the time. However, Vertical Slice stunned Electronic Arts. According to them, Prodigal was one of the most impressive playable pitch Demos they'd ever seen but they questioned whether a racing game mixing combat & magic would compete with established street racing trends. It would be more than a year later that the public's infatuation with the supernatural was sparked by Harry Potter and spawned countless entertainment products focused on magic.

An example of how Prodigal was sold to publishers

A thrilling atmosphere as soon as the title screen appears

Developed for around 1 year before being abandoned, alongside D-CAP which was the code name for the military racing game *Divided City (another Unreleased Xbox 360/PS3 game), Prodigal was the most ambitious project undertaken by the Canadians at PI, and a major title for the studio. They devoted an enormous amount of time, effort and money to the design of the game's Demo presentation to publishers, and then to its further development. Intellectual property would always belong to the founding members of Pseudo Interactive. No doubt the question will arise as to whether Prodigal will be rebooted in the future.

*Divided City (D-CAP), like Prodigal, had failed to convince any publisher to pursue its development. Both titles were pitched at the same time. In the end, this smaller-scale project appeared to PI to be an ordinary military game in comparison with Prodigal's rich and mysterious universe.

With Prodigal, Need For Speed and Devil May Cry met and joined forces to form a single game.

Prodigal: The game

For the first time since Vectorman PlayStation 2, PI's employees were stepping out of their comfort zone to offer gamers something other than interactive car racing, in the knowledge that their reputation relied on this type of game. In this regard, Prodigal was designed to alternate between third-person view (Devil May Cry) and in-car gameplay (Need For Speed).

Some beautiful artwork

To bring together TPS and car racing - two diametrically opposed game genres - and form a coherent whole, Prodigal's designers came up with the ingenious idea of having the hero drive a black convertible haunted by a benevolent ghost throughout his adventure. The car behaved like KITT in the successful Knight Rider series and could drive autonomously when Noah exited the vehicle to explore and perform stunts. This original concept, the primary intention around which the title's gameplay and narrative would develop, allowed, among other things, the progression of a level to be intercut with attractive cutscenes (QTEs) staged outside the car.

The story of Prodigal takes place in a world plunged in the darkness of black magic, a wasteland inhabited by the supernatural. Following the suspicious death of his father, Noah Caglionossi returns home to his family, after having voluntarily distanced himself from them. As stipulated in his father's will, an event known as “Wild Hunt” will determine who succeeds him at the head of his infamous crime syndicate, which operates in the shadows all over Europe. The hero's siblings, not to mention other warring clans, clash mercilessly in this unusual hunt. They all aspire to lead this influential criminal organization.

The storyline of Pseudo Interactive's title highlights the rivalries between the game's various characters. It exposes the motivations of each person. It surprises the player with unexpected twists and turns, involving acts of betrayal between trusted individuals in violation of the unspoken rules customary in Prodigal's particular social milieu. In conclusion, everyone involved in the “Wild Hunt” is out to get their own way and prevent anyone else from triumphing before them.

The son of a demon and an angel, Noah refused all his childhood to follow in his sire's footsteps in the empire of crime. His character was forged by mimicry of his mother's and her divine goodness. Once he was old enough to leave the family cocoon, he ran away and gradually isolated himself in the Badlands of the western United States, wandering from town to town in his “Ghost” car, living off odd jobs and street racing against punks. When his father disappears, he returns to his family against his will...

Concept de Stiltskin

Noah has intimate knowledge of the supernatural realm, and always keeps a cool head. He's like a cross between Spike from Cowboy Bebop and John Constantine, caught in an underground mafia's power struggle.

The summary of Prodigal's story leaves one wondering. All that's left to do is read the detailed scenario to understand the outcome of Noah's adventure, and find out the ins and outs.

The Prodigal Demo

To impress publishers and land a contract with one of them, PI's developers created a playable Demo of Prodigal, recorded a trailer and wrote a multitude of Game Design documents. They spent most of the development time on Prodigal, before it's cancellation, programming and fine-tuning a Vertical Slice (VS) meant to represent the game in its final form. With this 10-minute playable version, they wanted to draw attention to the gameplay aboard Noah's car, the destructible environments and the title's scenography. However, apart from the VS, they briefly tested the gameplay elements in third-person view on untextured “test maps”.

The demon that initiates the level (in-game and its model)

Unreleased Prodigal Pseudo Interactive.jpg

One of the hallmarks of Pseudo Interactive's games is their ability to partially destroy the environment around the player. Prodigal and its Vertical Slice are no exception to this rule. By demolishing parts of the scenery, space-time rifts can sometimes open up, teleporting Noah and his car into low-gravity time-distortion zones (Timecode at 5:40 in the video). While traversing them only takes a few seconds, the distortion effects of the buildings and the foggy yellow rendering on the screen are impressive, being some of the highlights of the Demo!

A video from Prodigal to present the game to publishers.

The Demo includes chases against rivals, in-car gunfights and QTE cinematics. Although not implemented in the VS, the game is said to have shifted to a third-person view once it reached the cathedral (Timecode at 4:15), with a section of the building explorable on foot. The third-person gameplay, less dynamic than that of Devil May Cry, was oriented towards a form of stealth - somewhere between Capcom's Beat-em-up and Ubisoft's Splinter Cell. The relic that Noah and “Ghost” steal before leaving the basilica (Timecode at 4:35) would have been the result of a mission inside the building. Stiltskin, enraged by this intrusion into his lair, awakens and relentlessly pursues Prodigal's hero until the end of the Demo. The final escape sequence from the Vertical Slice consists of, in a shower of debris, avoiding the cars and buildings that the enormous red demon keeps hurling at Noah.

While playing an unreleased demo is always a pleasure, knowing there's nothing more to it leaves an unfinished feeling, especially when its potential, as with Prodigal, is immediately apparent as soon as you get your hands on it.

After Prodigal and the end of Pseudo Interactive

Having failed to convince a publisher with Prodigal and Divided City, the Canadians at Pseudo agreed to reboot the Carmagedon franchise under the supervision of Eidos. To ensure the quality of this commissioned game, to be called Carmageddon: Crude Awakening, would meet gamers' demands and provide a worthy successor to the controversial title Carmagedon PC, PI's management spent the money it expected to collect throughout the development process, at each milestone, hiring additional staff.

Before embarking on this new production, the development team had no idea that Eidos was planning to sell its company. The American publisher had not been forthcoming about its intentions. Although Carmageddon: Crude Awakening was gaining momentum, Square Enix bought out Eidos and cancelled most of its external projects, including CCA. Pseudo Interactive, with no cash flow following the discontinuation of Carmageddon Xbox 360/PS3, quickly ran out of cash. The money PI had set aside until then was used to pay redundancy compensation to most of the company's employees.

In an attempt to redress the balance and avoid the inevitable, as a last “Hail Mary”, Pseudo Interactive tried to attract new investors by launching a few other projects with a now reduced team. Nothing was successful...

Presentation of Cloverfield The Game, with a prototype from Prodigal

The dossier including the pitch for Cloverfield the Game

Unreleased Cloverfield The Game Xbox 360.jpg

One of these was for a video game, Cloverfield The Game, based on Matt Reeves' 2008 film. Presented to Bad Robot, the film and TV production company owning the rights to Cloverfiled, it unfortunately didn't go beyond the simple pitch stage. The presentation file sent to the company founded by J. J. Abrams included a surprising video, the one above, showing several characters (all Noahs) at the same time running on a Prodigal prototype. The failure of the partnership with Bad Robot for Cloverfield The Game, Pseudo Interactive's latest project, marked the end of the Toronto studio after 13 years of loyal service!

Little known to the general public, Pseudo Interactive was a talented studio that contributed to physics in the videogame industry. The Canadian firm fell victim to its own originality and bad investments on Carmageddon: Crude Awakening.

The Prodigal prototypes

In July 2024, a hardware recycler in Calgary, Canada, sold 15 Xbox 360 development kits and 7 Xbox development kits belonging to Pseudo Interactive. Acquired by members of the community concerned with the safeguard of videogame heritage, their data was extracted. No fewer than 76 Carmageddon: Crude Awakening Xbox 360 prototypes, 6 Divided City Xbox 360 betas and 80 Prodigal Xbox 360 builds were unearthed and shared on Internet, then finally referenced on specialized preservation sites.

The gymnasiums (Blockout)

A Test Map in the Carmageddon: Crude Awakening environment

The most complete prototype, promising an optimal gaming experience, is undoubtedly the Demo/Vertical Slice labelled “Prodigal (May 31, 2007 Showcase prototype)”, the one used to record one of the videos in the previous chapter. The other builds are iterations of Prodigal, or experiments undertaken by PI developers on test maps often taken from the Unreleased CCA. For example, the beta with the cathedral's interior rendering (it freezes) was used to demonstrate the visual improvement of the game engine.

Rendering inside the cathedral

Third-person action/adventure gameplay is limited to test levels designed using the “Blockout” process. Only the character and a few elements of the scenery have textures. Inside a sort of gymnasium, Noah can walk, run, aim, shoot, jump...

If you'd like to play Prodigal, Divided City or Carmageddon: Crude Awakening, their respective prototypes are listed on the “Pseudo Interactive lot” page of the Hidden Palace website.

We can only thank the entire Pseudo Interactive team (Mobygames link to Full Auto Xbox 360) involved in the Prodigal Xbox 360 project for having tried to innovate with a game out of the ordinary. We can only feel sorry for them for not having been able to follow through on their desires and creations!

Special thanks to:

Hicks for proof-reading the French text
Neil Riddaway for the English correction of the article

The other pages of the Vectorman Playstation 2 preservation project: