Pure arrogance: developer studio Avalanche responds to harsh criticism from Mad Max director

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According to George Miller, the game Mad Max wasn’t as good as he wanted it to be. Avalanche founder Christofer Sundberg doesn’t want to leave it at that

Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagahas been in theaters since May 23. The new Mad Max film is an impressive firework display of action on the big screen, but is a financial flop. It was once again directed by George Miller.

The 79-year-old is not only making headlines because of his new film. In the course of an interview about Furiosa, Miller also commented on the action gameMad Max-much to the annoyance of developer studio Avalanche.

Statement on red carpet causes anger

At the Furiosa premiere, Miller was asked on the red carpet byGamingbiblewhether he would be interested in a new Mad Max gameHis answer:

We had a game [in development] when we made Fury Road. We were asked many times before if we wanted to make one. And it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.

But that’s not all. The 79-year-old goes on to say that there were no concrete plans on the part of the filmmakers.Rather, all the material was handed over to a company.

I’m one of those people who would rather not do something if they can’t do it at the highest level, or at least try. But I just spoke to [Hideo] Kojima [note: developer of the Metal Gear series], who traveled all the way from Japan. If he would take it on … but he has so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I would never ask him. […]

Avalanche get backing from Larian

This statement immediately called Christofer Sundberg, founder of Avalanche, to the scene at X (formerly Twitter).Even though Miller did not mention Avalanche by name, it was Sundberg’s studio that developed Mad Max in 2015.

The Avalanche founder criticizes those responsible in a post of his own:

This is complete nonsense and shows pure arrogance. They did everything they could to make it a completely linear game after teaming up with an open-world game developer. I’m sure Hideo Kojima would make a fantastic Mad Max game, but it would be a completely different experience.

In further posts, Sundberg discusses the situation at the time, which he believes was not so easy:

After the first year of development, they realized that they had forced us to create a linear experience instead of the open-world game we had proposed. We threw away a year of work and were told thatplayers today want autonomy

Since Avalanche, at least according to Sundberg, was caught in a conflict between the Australian production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM) and the US film studio Warner Bros:

If they had had their way, it would have been a completely linear story with quick-time events. We proposed an open-world game that they really liked at the time, and that’s what they got – and a damn good one at that. KMM has zero idea about game development and we got into a political shitstorm between Warner Bros. and them.

So that you can get your own impression of the action game Mad Max, we have linked our test video here.

Sundberg receives support from Michael Douse, Director of Publishing at Larian.Douse also writes on X,that the developers at Avalanche did not have access to Fury Road at the time It was therefore difficult to capture the mood of the movie. But that was just a nuance that George Miller knew nothing about

The action game Mad Max was released in 2015 – just like the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. At the time, we gave the action game a score of 76, praising its atmosphere in particular and criticizing its long-term motivation. And if you want to know how good or bad we think the new movie Furiosa is, we’ve also linked Vali’s expert opinion.