Home Archive Gun 2 nearly happened, according to former Activision Boss.

Gun 2 nearly happened, according to former Activision Boss.

by GH Staff

Once upon a time, Activision released an open world wild western game called Gun. It was much like Rockstar’s massively successful Red Dead Redemption, give or take about 5 years of technical innovation and Rockstar magic. It was still a pretty amazing game, and I doubt Red Dead would have been as successful if Gun hadn’t paved the way first. Colour me curious then that it turns out that Activision greenlit a sequel, turning the one off game into a franchise, but canned it in favour of more Tony Hawk games.

According to former Activision president Joel Jewitt, Neversoft studio, the folks responsible for both franchises, didn’t have enough employees to tackle both at the same time, and wanted to focus efforts on new Hawk games for the new generation of consoles.

“We just didn’t have the manpower to make [Gun 2] and another skateboarding game,” he continued. “We had to take our engine to the next level, because we were [moving to] the Xbox 360. We had to put everybody back on the [Tony] Hawk franchises.”
Gun came out of the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and the recently released Xbox 360 in November 2005, one month after the release of the unsuccessful Tony Hawk: American Wasteland. Neversoft would continue to develop Tony Hawk’s Project 8 and Tony Hawk’s Proving Groud, before handing off the sinking franchise onto Robomodo so they could work on Guitar Hero games.

Despite failing to appear, Jewett had some nice things to say about it’s successor, Red Dead Redemption.
“We thought there was going to be this big demand out there [for a Wild West game]. Quite frankly, I think we were right and I thank the guys at Rockstar for, in my opinion, proving us right.”