Celeste and Towerfall creators Extreme OK Games have announced the cancellation of their pixel art exploration platformer Earthblade, in what studio director Maddy Thorson calls “a huge, heartbreaking, yet relieving failure.” The decision to end the game comes as a result of setbacks within the development team, although this is clearly not the reason they withdrew from the game. Thorson and programmer Noel Berry found it exhausting to create something “bigger and better” than Celeste and decided to work on smaller projects in the future.
Extreme OK announced Earthblade in 2021, with Celeste composer Lena Raine handling the soundtrack. The actual reveal came in 2022, along with a bit of plot information: In the game, we would play as a “child of fate” exploring a ruined planet. Last March, Thorson blogged about development difficulties but assured readers that the team was making progress. This brings us to today. It looks like the past year has been more complicated than she initially let on.
Publication on the “Very OK” website. websiteThorson writes that last year there was a “rupture” between her and Berry and co-founder Pedro Medeiros, who was the art director of Earthblade and the pixel/UI artist on Celeste and Towerfall.
“The conflict centered around a disagreement over Celeste’s intellectual property rights, the details of which we will not disclose publicly – it was obviously a very difficult and painful process,” he explains. “We finally reached an agreement, but both sides ultimately agreed that we should go our separate ways. Pedro is working on his game now Neverwhich you should check out – we’ve played this game and it’s very promising.”
Pedro’s departure caused Berry and Thorson to think deeply about the status of Earthblade as a whole. “The project had a lot to offer, but frustratingly, its progress was not as advanced as would be expected after such a protracted development process,” Thorson continued. “I believe that if we had not given up despite everything, Earthblade would still be a great game.
“But would it be worth the pain? Noel and I also started to think about what it was like to work on the game on a daily basis and realized that it had been a challenge for us for a long time. Sure, working on one project for so long is bound to become a grind, but Celeste’s success seems to have put pressure on us to create something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure was a massive part of why working on it became like this. exhaustive.”
Thorson is careful to emphasize that Medeiros is not to blame for all of this – his departure simply created “a clarity for us to see that we had lost our way.” He adds that “if you were excited about Earthblade and angry about its cancellation, Pedro and the Neverway team are not enemies and anyone who treats them this way is not welcome in any EXOK community.”
As part of the appeal, Thorson and Berry parted ways with other members of the Earthblade team – that is Blackberry, Kyle Pulver, Ray’s Chevrolet, Raine and a sound design company Amplifying sound – though they hope to work with them again.
“Noel and I now want to take all the (many!) lessons we’ve learned from Earthblade, clear the slate, and refocus on smaller-scale projects,” Thorson continues. “We’re prototyping and exploring at our own pace again, and trying to reinvent game development in a way closer to how we approached it in the early days of Celeste or TowerFall.”
He concludes that “expanding the core team after Celeste was ultimately a failure, and there is nothing wrong with that. We did our best and life goes on. We’re excited to get back to our roots and reclaim some joy in our inventive process and see where it takes us.”
I admit I still haven’t found the time to play the great-sounding Celeste, but the same-screen archery madness of Towerfall was my favorite office lunch break when I worked at Future London. We gathered around the monitor and mostly fell victim to our own arrows, hooting like baby elephants. Clearly the people who made this game are geniuses. I wish Extreme OK and the departing Earthblade team members the best of luck in their future endeavors.
