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PS3's Warhawk Killed Jaffe's Heartland, Led to Eat Sleep Play

Posted February 26, 2010 by James Brightman

God of War creator and Eat Sleep Play founder David Jaffe recently spoke on Kotaku's radio podcast about his canceled PSP game Heartland. The game would have been a first-person shooter designed to bring about strong emotional responses from players, and it would have focused on a subject that many people have very strong feelings about: George W. Bush and his policies. 

"Heartland was a very liberal response to the Bush administration and the Iraq War. What I really wanted to do was to create a first-person shooter on the PSP that really tried to evoke emotions beyond the traditional emotions you get in a first-person shooter – you know, adrenalin and competition. I wanted to also evoke fear and sadness," Jaffe explained. "It was basically an invasion of the United States by a greater military power and you basically played a reserve guy who was trying to get back to his family. It was really sort of my attempt at speaking through video games about George Bush the second and the war and all that stuff. That's what Heartland was."

Jaffe's team, however, simply wasn't used to developing such provocative video games; they're more focused on arcade or action style games. "Scott Campbell and I – my business partner and co-designer with Eat Sleep Play - are very similar in some areas. We like acrade-y stuff, we like action stuff, we like pick up and play stuff. I tend to also like the more arty-farty, storytelling, you know, really trying to push the medium in that direction. I think it was just a bad marriage when it came to that particular design," Jaffe lamented. "I think they felt, 'This isn't the kind of game we like to make.' If you look at some of the great games they made on their own – Downhill Domination, War of the Monsters – those are games that really speak to the kind of company we are now and the kind of games that they've made."

Interestingly, what ultimately killed Heartland wasn't a lack of desire or a political argument - it was a lack of resources as Sony shifted people to work on Warhawk. "What happened was Scott would always call and say, you know we probably started with a team of about 20, and every couple of days he's like 'You know this guy got Warhawked. This guy got Warhawked.' Basically Warhawk was in production at the studio at same time, and it obviously was a much bigger game from a standpoint of Sony's agenda and lineup," Jaffe said. "It was a much more important title, because it was originally meant to be a launch title for the PS3, so we would keep losing members of our team to go over to help finish up Warhawk."

Eventually, as the team size continued to decrease, Jaffe decided he'd need to set out on his own. Fascinated by smaller, pick-up-and-play games on Xbox Live, he started up Eat Sleep Play. "By the end we were down to a skeleton crew of about six guys, and we were just like 'You know what? This is stupid. What are we doing?' That's when we started looking at XBLA and saying 'Hey, there's this thing called Geometry Wars. There's this option out there to start doing games like that.' And that kinda gave rise to how we started Eat Sleep Play. So it all kind of led to where we are now, and that's what happened to Heartland," he stated.

So will Heartland ever get made? Jaffe isn't ruling it out, but it's not likely to happen with his current team at Eat Sleep Play, he said. IndustryGamers would love to see more provocative titles tackling serious subject matter; it's a sign of maturity for video games as a medium, and although economics can get in the way sometimes, we'd like to see developers take more risks like this to push the boundaries of video games. The game industry has relied on almost entirely fantasy - let's see some new genres.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.