Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has revealed why Bully 2 was shelved by the studio in a rare interview.
Bully, also known as Canis Canim Edit, is a 2006 open-world action-adventure game which follows teenager James 'Jimmy' Hopkins who is involuntarily enrolled at boarding school for a year.
He attempts to become more popular with certain cliques, puts his efforts to rise through the ranks of the school system and, of course, gets himself into trouble along the way.
The game became a cult classic and it was previously reported Bully 2 actually went into development in 2008 but was shelved in late 2009 in favour of Max Payne 3.
And speaking with IGN at LA Comic Con, Houser revealed why this happened.
He said: "I think there was just bandwidth issues. If you've got a small, lead creative team and a small senior leadership crew, you just can't do all of the projects you want."
from Games
Houser's comments were reposted in the Games Subreddit and Redditors have been reacting to why Bully 2 was cancelled, with a number of users saying the same thing.
One user said: "I think Rockstar would benefit from something 'smaller' to pad the time between the larger releases, GTA and RDR. If it's Bully or maybe Max Payne or something else, I don't know but something not quite as open world, smaller in scope. I assume it's GTA Online taking all the developers that would otherwise be available."
Another agreed: "I will never understand why they don't have a side pipeline of 'small' one-to-two-year projects, they have the talent, the manpower and the money. I guess GTA Online is too juicy, low risk and easy for them to actually do something else."
"I'm so gutted we never got a Bully sequel and one that was set in college / university," a third added. "I could see Rockstar doing that setting so f****** well. It'd easily be one of my favourite games ever."
A fourth commented: "Lol, I thought it was some technical limitation of consoles back then, but it's not related to that at all."
"This has been an open secret for quite a while," a fifth claimed. "It's also why they outsourced the GTA Trilogy and part of the reason why they cancelled remasters of RDR1 and GTA 4. I'm guessing at this point they're just wrapping things up with GTA 6 and preparing to begin full production on RDR3 next year but I really hope they'd put that one aside for a while and focused instead on smaller projects such as Bully 2 and a new Midnight Club. Perhaps even a new IP."
Houser also spoke about GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 during the interview, saying he has had no involvement in the upcoming game and that RDR2 was "the best thing [he] worked on" while at Rockstar.
Elsewhere from indy100:
- Rockstar Games' Bully remaster speculated after new PS5, Xbox and PC listing
- How Lazlow Jones wrote "challenging" Red Dead Redemption 2
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