Arkane’s 2017 immersive sim Prey is a genuinely great videogame, with a genuinely weird name—shared with a pre-existing shooter and a famously cancelled sequel that it has absolutely nothing to do with. Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio said a few years ago that he really did not want to call it Prey, and it turns out he was not alone on that: Former Bethesda marketing and communications boss Pete Hines said in an interview with Dbltap that he was dead-set against it too.
“I definitely pissed some people off internally over that because I fought so hard against using that name,” Hines said. “I’m the head of the spear, but I had a lot of people across my team—brand, PR and community—and we feel like we’re burdening it with a name where we spend more time explaining why it’s called Prey than we do talking about the game.”
The reason for all that time spent explaining, as previously noted, is that the whole thing was so odd. Prey—the original—was developed by Human Head Studios and released in 2006, and it was quite good. A sequel was planned, although it was more of a spinoff, following the adventures of a completely different character in a completely different setting: A great cinematic trailer set a bar that the planned sequel couldn’t quite clear, and it was ultimately scrapped.
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Years later, Bethesda decided to resurrect the title for a completely unrelated project, and thus one of the best immsims of all time was hung with a needlessly confusing name. Explanations as to exactly why were never entirely convincing, and according to Colantonio, the Arkane founder, nobody at the studio wanted it—and being forced to use the name was part of why he decided to leave Arkane just a couple months after Prey (2017) was released.
Hines told Dbltap he regrets losing his battle against calling the game Prey, but added that “nobody on this planet could have put more of a good faith effort into changing minds on that.”
“My whole point was, look how much time we spend talking about what the game is versus why it’s called this and like, that is wasted energy. That is wasted excitement,” Hines said. “We could be turning that into something positive.”
I sure don’t disagree. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that recycling the Prey name was responsible for its unfortunate underperformance, but it surely didn’t help—and with the option to call it literally anything else on the table, I will never understand why Bethesda was so determined to stick with it. Regardless of that, though, it really is a phenomenal game, and if you haven’t played it yet it’s your lucky day, because it’s currently on sale for 80% off—just $6—on GOG.
This wasn’t the only interesting reminiscence in the interview: Hines also shared some fun memories of the great Fallout 76 canvas bag debacle: “When the fuck did we add a canvas bag to this collector’s edition?”
