Original Saints Row design director Chris Stockman is talking to the hellgods at Embracer Group about making a prequel open world game, possibly set in 1977 and containing absolutely no dildo bats. This comes almost two decades after Stockman left Saints Row development studio Volition, and a couple of years after Embracer closed Volition amid wider cuts.
Stockman is currently studio director of VR outfit Bit Planet Games, creators of The Battle of Sol and Ultrawings. He’s been bigging up the idea of a Saints Row comeback for a few weeks, publicly asking Embracer to get in touch in an October interview with Esports Insider. “I can bring much of the old band back together who worked on Saints Row 1,” he told the site at the time. “I could turn that IP around with a decent budget. They don’t even have to fund it. I could get other outside people to fund it. I could turn the franchise around. I know I could.”
Embracer have now taken the bait, or at least, expressed an interest in hearing the full pitch. “Guys and Gals, I have hopeful news!” Stockman wrote on Reddit last Friday. “I’ve been asked to create a pitch for a Saints Row reboot! “I can’t say anything more than that but my dreams for this game just became a little more than just dreams!” He added in an update that the pitch is not for a VR game. PCGamesN have separately confirmed with Stockman that the people asking him to share more are Embracer.
Stockman has also been active in other Reddit threads, explaining his vision for the game. “I’m trying to resurrect the franchise by doing a prequel,” he told one commenter. “I do want to take the series back it’s core roots but also blend in some of stuff that people loved about SR2.”
In another post, Stockman also turned down suggestions that he let players murder each other with sex toys again. “[N]o giant dildos as weapons”, he wrote, adding elsewhere that “I would’ve never put that abomination of a weapon in the series”.
Abominations they may have been, Stockman, but I do not look unfondly upon Saints Row’s free-roaming dildonics. I remember when they sent us real-life purple dildobats as marketing merch for Saints Row 3. There is footage of me online somewhere backstabbing noted writer and video personality Matt Lees with one. Ahhh, to be young again.
In general, Stockman seems inclined to take Saints Row in a serious direction, following the ever-zanier antics of Saints Row 2 onwards. In the interview with Esports Insider, he took a withering view of the 2022 Saints Row reboot, one of Volition’s final projects before Embracer put them under (we called it “fun but sadly confused”).
“There’s a level of expectations for a Saints Row game, and they missed the mark on all of them,” Stockman said. “What I would have done was to take the franchise back to the 70s and do a period piece, a prequel of how the gangs from the first one started. You’re running around with a crew of teens that ended up as the main characters for the first game. You could really go all in on the 70s theme with big Afros, bell-bottoms, and the music of that whole period.
“I’d have taken it into a different direction so you’re not competing with the modern-day GTA games,” he added. “You’re zagging when everyone else is zigging, so to speak.” Later in the chat, Stockman commented that much as he rates Saints Row 3 in particular, the developers fell into a trap of “trying to one-up themselves with the ridiculous content”. He “would have preferred to keep things relatively grounded in a pseudo-reality”.
In yet another Reddit response on Friday, Stockman followed up on his interview by identifying 1977 as the magical year for his current Saints Row pitch. “The core idea of Saints Row ’77 is to go back to the roots of what made SR 1 entertaining in the first place,” he wrote. “It was somewhat grounded in reality but also a bit zany too. It had a lot more satirical elements vs. the later entries.”
Here are the emotions all this has made me feel, in no particular order: 1) I am newly sad that Volition were closed, having heard a tiny bit about life over there during research for my piece on the cancelled Red Faction pitch at fellow Embracer joint Fishlabs. 2) I’m dubious that Stockman knows how to run an open world production, given that he has spent so many of the intervening years making other kinds of videogame. 3) I’m kind of apathetic about Saints Row at this point. 4) I wouldn’t trust Embracer to deliver a pizza, after the events of the past few years. 5) I would quite like some urban open world games to write about that aren’t GTA 6, particularly now that Rockstar are allegedly cracking down on unions. How about you?
