Throughout the years, Krome Studios went from a small Brisbane studio working on groundbreaking original IP, to a nationwide studio known for being the go-to workhorse of licensed titles. The collapse of Krome Studios at the end of last year left a gaping hole in the Australian game development industry, and left many workers wondering where to turn - but beyond that, it scuttled many of the ideas that have been bubbling around in the head of “Space Captain” Steve Stamatiadis, the Creative Director of Krome and the man who was there right from the beginning to make it all happen. We spoke to Steve about these lost ideas, and the Krome games that might have been.

This town ain't big enough for two 60's-themed female leads

One of the games that came closest to making it was Kat Burglar, an action-stealth game that began life in late 1998 during Steve’s time at Gee Whiz! Entertainment with John Passfield. A light-hearted game with a James Bond-style 60’s flair, Steve recalls that they encountered some difficulty selling their prototype to publishers in 2000. “It was about the same time that No One Lives Forever was being shown around. And the problem we were running into when we were showing publishers, was ‘Monolith is showing this game where they have this 60’s female spy, and you’re showing us this game with a 60’s female thief, you can’t have two games set in the 60’s with a female character in them! That’s the same thing!’. And we were like ‘Wait, what?’”

Recounting with a touch of bitterness that it was apparently okay to have a dozen identical “muscular space marine” games on the market at the same time, Steve and the team were forced to shelve the game. “They just weren’t getting it, even if they did like the characters”, says Steve, remembering failed deals with partners like Mattel. “I’ll always remember the guys came back from one meeting with a publisher, and the publishers said ‘We’re pretty sure there’s already a 60’s female thief game with a character that has red hair’, and I’m standing there going 'Are they... talking about our game?'”.

Set on the island of Mont-St. Michael, Kat Burglar featured a number of adventure-game driven mechanics similar to those found in Flight of the Amazon Queen, as well as AI sidekicks who you could give orders to through hand gestures. The intent was to have a Zelda-style unlockable open world, with the island opening up to you as you progressed. Despite the game being developed to a playable state through one prototyped level, they were unable to secure a publisher. Opportunity did come knocking later in the year, as Sony expressed a desire to publish a cartoony platformer on their PS2 - a desire that Krome were only too happy to help fulfill. That game that would later go on to become TY The Tasmanian Tiger, and one of the company’s most iconic franchises.

Many of the ideas and concepts of Kat Burglar were eventually carried over into one of Krome’s last published titles, Blade Kitten - including a strong resemblance between Katherine Kelly of Kat Burglar and the pink-haired Kit Ballard of Blade Kitten. “I had all these elements I wanted to use but we apparently couldn’t do a 60’s game,” says Steve, “so I went and turned it into a sci-fi, anime game instead”.

Marsupial Air Combat Redefined

Another of Krome’s famously unreleased games, and one that actually made it to the stage of being a playable demo at Supanova expos, was TY: Gunyip, a free-roaming air combat game set in the universe of TY The Tasmanian Tiger and that spun-off from the Gunyip mini-game included in TY 3. “After three TY games and most of the team working on it for three or four years, we wanted to do something different. We felt that we’d pretty much done everything we could do with running around and throwing boomerangs. Every game had a new type of boomerang to add in... we just needed to do something different.”

Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Steve describes Gunyip as “the most accurate simulator of marsupial air combat” ever created. The game featured giant open maps set in the TY universe with a sprawling storyline that was told from three different points of view, something that Steve looks back on fondly. “Once you played all three you actually got the full story for the game,” says Steve, describing a complex and layered narrative in a new chapter of an existing tale that, even to this day has a huge number of diehard fans across the internet. “It was pretty hi-falutin’ for a kids game where you fly around in robots shooting other things,” he laughs. “But it’s the interaction of all these characters that makes the story fun.”

Much like almost all of Krome's titles, Gunyip’s development took place over multiple versions, with one of those created by the former Atari Studio in Melbourne which Krome later absorbed. This version, which Steve excitedly recalls as “awesome”, had no story elements but was an online multiplayer game over Xbox LIVE which allowed players to team up and shoot down endless waves of enemies in an arcade-like fashion. Unfortunately a publisher-funded project showed up on the doorstep, and development on Gunyip was left aside in favour of games which were guaranteed to actually make the company money. “It was going really well,” laments Steve, “but then it we had to give the Melbourne guys a paid project to work on, which snowballed into another one, and so on... sometimes your success actually limits you from doing what you want to do.”

One of those paid projects putting a stop to Gunyip’s development was The Force Unleashed. “I’m a massive Star Wars fan,” says Steve, laughing. “I remember telling Robert (Walsh) that I was ‘going to go after this game aggressively’. Those were my exact words. And when I took it to the team and I said ‘Do you want to work on a Star Wars game, or do you want to finish off Gunyip?’ and they said ‘....Star Wars.’” The work on Gunyip did not go to waste however, as it was a Star Wars-themed reskin of the Gunyip engine that sold LucasArts on Krome’s potential to handle The Force Unleashed. “We reskinned it into a Jedi and space combat game in three weeks,” Steve recalls happily. “We blew them away. They loved it.”

Below the Surface


Games like Kat Burglar and Gunyip are some of the more obscure, but still publicly known titles developed by Krome. Surface Tension, however, was a different story. “It was sort of a cross between Pikmin and Populous,” says Steve. “The surface of the world was this sort of non-Newtonian fluid, and you had to guide your creatures from island to island, but if you had too many in one spot, they’d sink.” The team worked on the game’s development for six weeks, creating a demo which allowed you to order your creatures around, drop markers to attract and repel enemies, and so on. The objective was to send your creatures to the end of the level, directing them to solve problems along the way - chopping down trees to serve as bridges across the water, and generally being completely adorable.

“It was never really meant to get shown,” says Steve. “It was more a test to see if we could do something different.” Developed on Krome’s PS2 engine, the game was abandoned when they begin to migrate to the next-gen engines built for the Xbox 360 and the PS3, although they did discuss returning to it after the first episode of Blade Kitten was published - a dream that, sadly, may never be realised.

Carpe Noctum and ACLAND

Surface Tension is not the only game that failed to make it out of the prototyping phase at Krome’s headquarters. “One of them was a multiplayer, steampunk-era game where you had these characters fighting Victorian-era demons”, says Steve. “Carpe Noctum was the title of that one. We also had this monster game that we’d been wanting to do for a long time, called Project ACLAND”. The game was at least three years worth of work according to Steve, but it was something that publishers had shown definite interest in. “The lack of R18+ rating was a problem, as it was going to be really gory,” he says, “like a monster movie. But there was no way you can sell a game like that in Australia. At times I was thinking ‘Why would I want to make a game that I can’t even play here?’”

The ACLAND monster, named after Acland Lane behind Krome’s Brisbane offices, would later go on to star in Blade Kitten. ”I’d really love to come back do Project ACLAND right,” Steve says, thinking of the future. “It’s been three years, and nobody’s done anything like it, or even close.”

So what is on the cards for Space Captain Steve then, in the future - will he go back to games? “The industry is really screwed,” he says, laughing bitterly. “Getting stuff done is really hard at the best of times, and... it’s not the best of times. But I’m do have some ideas, maybe something for iPad. I’ve got some great ideas for adventure games. We’ll have to see what happens.”