The survival horror exclusive remained grounded because of publishers who "don't want to stick their necks out" and "[are] still trying to figure out the Wii" two years after the console's release.
For more than a year, IGN has been hinting at the existence of a "dark" and "mature" game for the Wii and its failure to procure a publisher to bring it to fruition. That game has finally been revealed as Winter, a survival horror project that developer n-Space has been shopping around since GDC 2007.
Winter is, or was, a demo that n-Space created in six weeks with no more than 12 people working on it at its peak. Best known for their Nintendo-funded GameCube paranormal shooter Geist, n-Space had taken their experience and used it "take the [Survival Horror] genre back to basics" on Nintendo's newest home console.
According to Creative Director Ted Newman, Winter started with "the setup of a single character alone in extreme circumstances, struggling to stay alive and adding another layer of survival on top." The protagonist, Mia, would be trapped in a Midwestern town during a mysterious blizzard, and the mounting cold would be "as big an enemy as anything in the game." Initially this would mean finding ways to stay warm like "using the Wii controller to spark a fire and light some oily rags," but eventually the developers imagined that the environments would be "transformed by snow and ice" and that players would be forced "to climb through second story windows or walk on rooftops." N-Space even brainstormed ways to make the Wii Remote and Nunchuk "extensions of the player's hands." For example, a flickering flashlight would require players "to tap the Wii Remote against their hands until it starts working properly," or they could cautiously open doors slowly with the motion recognition technology "to peek inside first."
Unfortunately, the project has gone nowhere since 2007. Speaking with IGN, n-Space President Dan O'Leary said that Winter was pitched "tirelessly for months," and the early responses were "universally positive." But every time things got moving n-Space would hit a brick wall. "In almost every case we got hung up with the sales and marketing groups," explained O'Leary, "the idea of an 'adult' game on what they perceived to be a 'kids' console was simply too big a leap for them, regardless of the enthusiastic support of the PD department and the Wii's total domination in the marketplace."
Further elaborating on the difficulties of "pitching anything that isn't a kid's game for the Wii," O'Leary claimed that "publishers are missing a lot of opportunities on the Wii." Despite the excitement over the project, it seems that the factors working against Winter were related to publishers being afraid to leave their comfort zones. "They can't apply their standard approaches to this platform," explained O'Leary, adding that publishers "don't want to stick their necks out with a sales projection when they aren't able to cite comparable products." O'Leary said that publishers would dismiss the proven success of Wii horror games like Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, but argued that "you can only make [Resident Evil 4] if you have the courage to try [Resident Evil 1]."
Of course, the woes of bringing ambitious projects to Nintendo's market-leading platform are a topic of much discussion, but O'Leary's statements highlight something particular. His comments point to a tragic inequality between developers and publishers when it comes to the Wii.
In one part of the interview, O'Leary talked of the Wii's penchant for innovation and boasted that "n-Space understood this from day one." Just a paragraph earlier, O'Leary was lamenting that "publishers still say to us on a regular basis, 'we're still trying to figure out the Wii.'"
It's this frustrating dichotomy between developers who embrace the Wii's promise and publishers who shun its uniqueness that is holding Winter back, and keeping Wii gamers in the cold.
For more on the story behind Winter, check out IGN's full interview.
