The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is the rarest kind of mid-'00s licensed game – one that doesn't just do justice to its source material, but exceeds it. The FPS got rave reviews at launch, and it's broadly regarded as one of the original Xbox's greatest hidden gems, but you'd be forgiven if it's flown under your radar. After all, it was so underground that not even the game's own developers heard about it being cancelled deep into development.
According to art director Jens Matthies, speaking in a new Noclip documentary, roughly "two-thirds" of the way into development at Starbreeze Studios "the game got cancelled. But our publisher guy didn't tell us about it. We kept going!"
The game was ultimately saved from its brief death because it was a valuable marketing tool, and the film studio convinced publisher Vivendi Universal Games to restart development. Well, perhaps "restart" is the wrong word, since work on it never stopped in the first place.
"Back then," Matthies explains, "if you released a movie license game, the whole purpose of that was a marketing tool for the movie. Fortunately, the movie studio needed that component as part of their marketing plan, so they basically forced the publisher to restart the game again – un-cancel it. So the game was cancelled for two weeks, and we didn't know about it."
Escape from Butcher Bay getting saved to serve as a tie-in to The Chronicles of Riddick is a bit ironic, considering the game launched to an impressive 89 on Metacritic, while the movie got dismal reviews and is generally considered the worst entry in its franchise.
Riddick star Vin Diesel, whose then-newly founded Tigon Studios also worked on Butcher Bay, came to bring his trademark gravel to the game. Escape from Butcher Bay technically fits into the FPS genre, but it also blends stealth and adventure elements alongside a gritty, futuristic prison setting.
You might see a familiar spirit if you've played the modern Wolfenstein games or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and that's because many of the developers behind Escape from Butcher Bay – including Matthies – would go on to co-found MachineGames in 2009. Many of them still work there to this day, even as it's become part of Bethesda, and thus Microsoft.
But what of publisher Vivendi Universal Games, which briefly had Escape from Butcher Bay canceled? Well, Vivendi owned many subsidiaries, including the likes of Sierra and Blizzard, and would eventually merge with Activision in 2008 to create Activision Blizzard. So, yes, it's also part of Microsoft now. I guess it all comes up green in the end.
Escape from Butcher Bay ranks very highly in our list of the best original Xbox games of all time.
