Indie Dev Introversion Shelves Subversion

Subversion, as you may know, is a city heist simulator that’s been in development since early 2008. The game’s developers, who also created Darwinia and DEFCON, once touted Subversion as their pride and joy.

Contrary to expectations, Introversion submitted a totally different game to the 2011 Independent Game Festival instead of Subversion.

The announcement was made on the Introversion forums:

“Around August last year, I took a couple of weeks off and went on holiday in California. It was a great chance to think clearly about something that had become very difficult. Daily work on Subversion seemed to be going well, with lots of regular technological progress, but whenever I considered the project from the high level view I wondered where the core game was ultimately going to come from.

“And that was when the next game idea arrived. This new idea was fully formed, just like DEFCON, just like Uplink. I could see most of the core game design straight away. I could see how much of the tech that we’d designed for Subversion was directly applicable, if properly turned on its head. And within an hour or two, I’d made up my mind. I went old-school and bought a blank notebook, the first time I’ve used one since Uplink, and spent most of the ten hour flight home writing it all down. Those first 10 pages written on that flight are the design bible that we still stick to today.

“And like that, the decision that should have been incredibly difficult was made. We don’t have the manpower to do multiple projects, so it was one game or the other, and I had no trouble convincing Mark and Tom which way I wanted to go.

The developer says that Subversion has not been canceled, but the studio is certainly putting it on hold for now—at least until they finish their current project.