The developer behind upcoming Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita game Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, Armature, consists of former Retro Studios employees Mark Pacini, Todd Keller and Jack Matthews. In an interview with Game Informer, Pacini revealed why he and his colleagues left the Nintendo subsidiary. Pacini said that while he thinks Nintendo is an “awesome company,” he didn’t like how working for the video game giant meant he was obliged to work solely on games for its hardware.
Stepping away from the game for a minute, why did you leave Retro? Do you want to talk about that story a little bit?
Armature’s Mark Pacini: I was there for eight years. When you work for Nintendo, Nintendo’s an awesome company. They’re great to work for. It’s hard, challenging work, but it’s rewarding at the same time. But given that regard, there’s a limited amount of things you can do in Nintendo. You can’t work on other platforms. You kind of work on games that they would like you to work on, so after doing three of the same games in a row, we were kind of like, we’d really like the flexibility to do other things.
And that’s really what it came down to was we didn’t have anything against Nintendo or Retro or anything – they’re all great people, we still talk to them all the time, and we still have a great relationship – but having an independent studio, one day you’re working on Batman, the other day you’re working on something else, and that’s kind of what we wanted to do. We would have never been able to work on Vita, or 3DS – it wasn’t something that Retro was gunning for. And Armature as a studio, we’re hopefully able to make some announcements later this year on what we’re working on next, and those are, again, forward thinking on consoles, and things we weren’t able to do before.
Starting Armature when we did was a very difficult time in the game industry. And the game industry continues to be difficult. Right now as a studio we’re in a really good position and there are a lot of opportunities that we’re going to be able to pursue that we wanted to five years ago.
