MinnMax Interview - How Meta Killed Ready At Dawn

MinnMax's Ben Hanson talks to the co-founder of Ready At Dawn Andrea Pessino about how the beloved studio behind Daxter and God of War on PSP, The Order: 1886, and Lone Echo was purchased by Meta and how it ultimately led to the end of the studio after 21 years. We also talk about canceled projects like a console action/adventure game published by Ubisoft, crunch, and frustrations of working with a big publisher like Sony.

You can watch and share the video version here - https://youtu.be/g7t6Wo2IcU8

Check out Game Informer's documentary on the history of Ready at Dawn here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_OcS4gAGw

To jump to a particular discussion, check out the timestamps below...

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:10 - Andrea Pessino on being finally free to talk

00:04:01 - Meta and the end of Ready At Dawn

00:15:23 - Friendship with Ru Weerasuriya

00:16:36 - Why sell Ready at Dawn to Meta?

00:19:43 - Scattering Ready at Dawn talent across the industry

00:25:51 - Why don't VR games get more attention?

00:32:34 - Cells Within and his future plans

00:36:03 - Working on StarCraft at Blizzard

00:39:11 - The future of the RTS

00:40:39 - Daxter on PSP's brutal development

00:51:56 - Is Naughty Dog still the best role model in the industry?

00:55:05 - Gamesa and the invasion of idiotic management

00:58:05 - How The Order's prototype led to Deformers

01:02:34 - The downside of GameStop publishing Deformers

01:06:07 - God of War on Vita

01:06:37 - How Naughty Dog killed Daxter 2 on PSP

01:08:31 - Creating God of War on PSP

01:10:43 - Ubisoft's absurd request on new IP

01:20:02 - Porting Okami to Wii

01:23:19 - Ready at Dawn's canceled/hidden projects

01:26:39 - What went wrong with The Order: 1886

01:37:29 - Why didn't Sony buy Ready At Dawn

01:41:49 - The sequel to The Order: 1886

01:50:29 - Building up multiplayer tech

01:52:12 - Final thoughts