In the music industry, the saying one hit wonder applies to when a band has only one successful hit single, and is purely remembered for that one hit single regardless whether or not they did produce any other music. The same thing happens in the gaming world where a developer may only produce one released title but it’s a commercial success but for whatever reason no future games make it to market. Sometimes a developer has multiple games under their belt but only one is remembered.
We will be looking back at some of these one hit wonder games over the coming weeks and months.
To kick things off, we going all the way back to 1999 and the release of Urban Chaos. Developed by Mucky Foot Productions and published by Eidos Interactive, Urban Chaos released first on PC on 10th December 1999, followed up by PlayStation on 31st March 2000 and then Dreamcast on 6th October 2000.
Although Urban Chaos isn’t the only released game from Mucky Foot Productions, out of the three that saw their way to market, Urban Chaos is the more successful and well known to date. It is also the first game of Mucky Foot Productions to be released.
The other two games from Mucky Foot Productions, both published by Eidos Interactive were Startopia in 2001 for PC and Blade II for both PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2002. The latter game was both a commercial and critical failure which is likely what caused, or at least played a major part, in Mucky Foot Productions closing their doors the following year. However, as a developer with six games in development at the time they closed, one has to wonder how thinly stretched the company must have been and whether Mucky Foot Productions were hitting deadlines?
One of the games in development at the time Mucky Foot Productions closed their doors was Urban Chaos 2. However, it transpires that Eidos Interactive never gave this game the green light for funding, which is surprising given the success of the original game.
The name Urban Chaos will later be used for 2006 release Urban Chaos: Riot Response from Rocksteady Games after the original developer Argonaut Games went bankrupt. This incarnation of the IP was also published by Eidos Interactive and there had already been two changes in the name over the years in the run up to release.
In 2017, the source code for Urban Chaos was made available under MIT license on GitHub.
Urban Chaos is a great third person action game in which the player takes on the role D’arci Stern after joining Union City Police Department as she goes around open world maps tackling crime across 24 levels with a gang known as the Wildcats as the villains behind the overarching storyline.
By today’s standards, the controls aren’t the easiest to get used to if you are not familiar with tank controls. But the underlying gameplay is still as great as it was back when new.
What I’d love to see, is a remaster of Urban Chaos in the manner of the Tomb Raider remasters or better yet, a remake but that is almost certainly not going to happen. The IP is owned by Square Enix as they took over Eidos Interactive so any developer interested in remastering or remaking Urban Chaos would need to go through Square Enix.
