Introversion on why they're done with Darwinia

We had the chance to catch up with Introversion at Bit of Alright recently, to talk about their new project, Prison Architect, the fate of Subversion and their plans for the future. One thing's for sure, Darwinia won't be part of it. Creative director, Chris Delay and managing director Mark Morris told us how the company ended up working on one game for so long when, in the beginning, they set out determined to keep making new games every one or two years.

One of the strengths of a small team of indie developers is their ability to throw up new ideas and change direction faster than large, publisher-funded studios. In Introversion's case, Darwinia's runaway success only slowed them down.

"We kind-of accidentally got trapped into making all of these different versions of Darwinia," said Mark Morris. "Because we won the IGF award, there were a lot of different people asking about different versions, and different ports so we kind-of naturally went down that route with it."

The experience of releasing an acclaimed title brings with it the lure of financial stability, and the threat of creative stagnation. After years of uncertainty during development the ability to fall back on a proven idea can prove tempting. "It's very difficult to know what to jump into next," said Mark.

"You've got this game, it's gained a bit of traction, people like it, you've put all this effort in, and you've launched it. It's natural then to to keep working on that on different platforms because you know it's a safe bet."

The decade of Darwinia development clashed with Introversion's ethos. They released Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon in their first six years, demonstrating a determination to keep working on fresh projects. This had been their plan from the very beginning.

"When we started the company we didn't want to do loads of sequels," Mark explained. "Back at the turn of the century, all of the old creativity that existed when me and Chris were growing up in the 80s and 90s had gone and it was all big-budget AAA stuff. Thankfully, we've returned to that now. The indie scene has brought that back."

Introversion recently demonstrated that willingness to drop everything and start something new when they announced that they were putting their long-running bank heist game, Subversion, on hold to work on something entirely new. That something was Prison Architect . You can find out more about how that's shaping up in our Prison Architect preview .

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.