It feels like a bizarre fit. Remedy, developer of esoteric third-person adventure games such as Control, Quantum Break and Alan Wake, is making a military first-person shooter campaign for the biggest game on earth. I mean, Remedy has never made an FPS before. So, what’s going on?
CrossfireX was announced as coming to Xbox during Microsoft’s E3 2019 briefing, but you’d be forgiven for missing it – or even forgetting about it. It felt like a curio then, one of those bring a massive game from Asia to the west and none of us really care sort of jobs. But the original Crossfire is probably the most popular game in the world, with over 650 million players, predominantly in South Korea and China. It’s like Counter-Strike, with two factions shooting each other to infinity and beyond. And it’s been going a long while: 10 years, developer SmileGate said. It’s a really big deal. A massive deal, in fact.
But how did Remedy get roped in? At XO19, I had a chat with SmileGate’s Jin Woo Jung, who told me he’s a massive fan of Max Payne and so Remedy was his first choice when it came to working out who would make a campaign for the western version of Crossfire, and then I interviewed Remedy’s Tuukka Taipalvesi and Thomas Puha to get the lowdown on how it all came to be, what’s going into Remedy’s take on a Call of Duty campaign, whether it’ll have bullet time, and a cheeky question about whether there will be a Control 2.
CrossfireX – X019 – First Gameplay Teaser Watch on YouTube
I asked the SmileGate chap, why Remedy? And it turns out he’s just a really big fan of Max Payne and it was just like a personal thing. He obviously didn’t pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket, but I get the sense that was why he wanted Remedy to do it.
Puha: Well, it wasn’t quite that simple, but that takes you a long way when people who want to work with you like what you’ve done.
Taipalvesi: They will actively try to seek you out and basically then get you involved and luckily, we had a mutual friend who basically was able to translate communications, and then our schedules matched and the stars aligned, and then we started to work together.