When asked about The Crossing, Raphael Colantonio and Viktor Antonov, two of the game’s leads, liken it to an ex-girlfriend. They were passionate about the project. They still have love for it. When they walked away, it was painful. But they’d never go back. Rather, they took the lessons learned and applied them to the rest of their respective careers.

The Crossing, at its core, was an experiment. It was a test to see if single-player and multiplayer could be one in the same, replacing a game’s AI with real-world players. It was also an homage to and examination of Paris — the city where both lived at the time. It was a risk, financially and commercially, that never came to fruition before Arkane Studios, on its own terms, cancelled the project. The team went on to develop the critically-acclaimed Dishonored series, and most recently Prey. The Crossing is in both the DNA of these games and Arkane itself.

To find out what happened, we talked to some of the game’s leads about what The Crossing was, how it played and why Arkane walked away from it. What we learned is a story of ambition, passion and pain, all wrapped up in something no one outside of Arkane will ever play.

“That, to me, is not very fun”

At the time, 2005 or so, Arkane consisted of about 45 employees. Readying to ship its 2006 game Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, as well as working on prototypes for Valve, it began kicking around ideas for its own IP, its own world. Something new. Which, Colantonio says, highly interested the company.

“At Arkane, [we] always had this kind of insecurity with multiplayer; we [were always] focused on single-player games with depth and storytelling,” he says. “But at some point I really wanted to see how we could do multiplayer. But at the time … shooting people in a multiplayer environment for no reason [was], to me, a little pointless. Just as a fan, just as a gamer. I accept that people love that, but for me it was a little pointless. It was a way to fuse both worlds and add the meaning to multiplayer. That’s how it started.”

“Raf had plenty of ideas and projects for the next game, and he briefly pitched several ones to see where the excitement [was] at,” says former Arkane level designer John Granier. “There was this one in particular that caught the attention of everybody, something along the lines of a ‘crazy single-player mixed with multiplayer’ project.

“The idea was to replace AI with actual players that would come and go as you play your campaign. Quite revolutionary at the time.”

Arkane called this mix of single and multiplayer “cross-player” — something it’d later use to publicize the game. Whereas, in a typical single-player game, a player would walk into a combat arena with AI enemies strategically placed around the level by a developer, cross-player filled the arena with other players who would join the game via a matchmaking service. While one player may want to play the game alone, going through its campaign, any players wanting to jump into multiplayer could assume the roles of some of the campaign player’s enemies.

“My experience usually [with multiplayer games] is I spawn, I’m looking for the action, it takes me a minute or two, I’ve found the action and I’m dead,” Colantonio says. “Then I have to wait for, like, 30 seconds to a minute before I can respawn and go again. That, to me, is not very fun. What we would do instead is, as the action was moving, we would always spawn the [enemy] player close to the action.”

With the idea in stone, Arkane got to work. This became The Crossing.

Getting campaign players to the action required building linear areas for them to traverse that would ultimately open up to a “choke point,” as Colantonio puts it, where they’d engage with enemies. Between the more linear sections and the multiplayer sections, campaign players would watch cutscenes, giving time for enemy players to load in and get into strategic positions to try to get the best of the campaign player. In a scenario, The Crossing may have seven or eight characters, with up to five controlled by real-world players — four enemies and one hero — and the others controlled by AI.

“It forced us to reevaluate everything we knew about level design,” Granier says. “Single-player is hard to do; you have to think about player affordance, navigation, world feedbacks, pacing, et cetera. Multiplayer, on the other hand, doesn’t have most of those challenges, but different ones such as balancing, timing, area partitioning, et cetera. And for both it takes months of iteration and polish.”

Combining both for cross-player, he continues, wasn’t as simple as mashing everything together. According to Granier, Arkane built levels that combined the progression philosophy of a single-player game with the mechanics and navigation of a multiplayer game.

“The player who’s playing [the campaign] doesn’t have much time to solve puzzles or analyze AI’s behavior before taking action like you would do in Dishonored. No, the enemies are aware of him and are already rushing to get a piece of him,” Granier continues. “Essentially we found out that it’s more beneficial for the overall experience to focus on the [single-player] and cautiously open the level for the [multiplayer] aspect.”

Dropping AI enemies for real players, Colantonio says, allowed for creative strategies on both ends. In a playable demo Arkane developed for The Crossing, if a player’s strategy worked the first time, they would think it’d be bound to work the second. And it tended to take a few rounds for players to change their tactics.

“You would think players are going to change every time, but they don’t,” Colantonio says.

“The idea of cross-player was really interesting; it immediately opened the door to tons of ideas and gameplay situations to create,” Granier says. “The [campaign] player was a templar with various weapons such as a sword, steampunk railgun and very fun boomerang; he was also equipped with a grapple that would allow him to reach any location, whether to get to a vantage point or to quickly reach a target. We wanted to oppose a very agile and fast player against tactical units.”

To complement its new take on single and multiplayer games, Arkane worked on an ambitious story that combined multiple worlds. To do this, the studio looked to artist Viktor Antonov.

“What is Paris?”

Antonov, a self-described science fiction world builder, was working at Valve when he met Colantonio. Valve sent him over to help Arkane learn to use the company’s Source engine for Arkane’s 2006 game Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

Colantonio and Antonov are two sides of the same coin. The former speaks slowly, thoughtfully. He articulates each answer like he’s practiced it before. He speaks like he runs a game studio. Antonov, on the other hand, speaks with a fiery delivery. He smokes constantly and quickly shifts gears, often sounding as if he’s riling himself up — either with passion or anger.

Though their personalities differ, once the two met, they made a decision: They were going to make a new world — one from scratch.

“First of all, Raphael and myself had a dream: Create a new IP as an independent, small company and have freedom,” Antonov says. “This was very important for us emotionally [and] career-wise because we felt we had enough experience already in the industry.”

The Crossing’s setting revolved around the idea of a “dystopia-utopia,” as Antonov calls it. Though the game was set in Paris, it featured two different worlds, one where Paris had dissolved into chaos and one where Paris was a “royal utopia.”

For Antonov, who moved to Paris from Bulgaria at the age of 17, and Colantonio, who based his company out of Lyon, France, they say the project was “very emotional.”

“We were telling a story of our country,” Antonov says. “We were telling a story about how we felt about Paris at the time. … So we tried to play with this concept of, ‘What is Paris?’ It’s a city of contrasts, luxury, beauty, kings. [But] kings are decapitated; it’s not a monarchy anymore.” On the other side, he adds, were slums surrounding the game world — similar to the way Versailles surrounds Paris.

In The Crossing, the modern-day world was the rundown world. As Antonov puts it, it was a world full of suburbs, ghettoes, drug dealers and gangsters. Scientists in the modern world had developed a way to fabricate alternate realities by going back in time and changing elements of the world, then letting the alternate reality play out, taking from it whatever gadgets or cool weapons it birthed. One of these alternate realities, they say, was accessible via a gate in the middle of Paris. But one day it malfunctions.

“Basically you [wake] up one morning and everything goes to shit. The gate’s open. It started in Paris with the invasion of some sort of futuristic Templar knights that were badass with hooks; they could fly around,” Colantonio says about the game’s story. “Your goal was to understand what was going on. You would realize little by little that there was this gate. You would find the gate, then you would go inside and go to the other world and keep going until you realize what truly [happened].”

Eventually, by the end of the game, the two worlds would become one, Antonov says, bringing the disparate parts into one incestuous alternate-reality Paris.

“It’s really in the vein of ‘70s sci-fi, where the fiction was about — not unlike The Matrix — two worlds living together,” he says. “You don’t know at the end which world you were [in], and we were planning to make them merge, where the portal between the two worlds breaks and we have a Gothic France with a ghetto-gangster France and new monuments emerge.”

For Arkane, The Crossing was a project it believed in — one about its city with a new take on single-player and multiplayer. And it was getting interest from prospective players. Without a publisher, The Crossing was on the cover of Games for Windows magazine, Colantonio gave interviews about the project and numerous outlets wrote about the new take on multiplayer.

Interest from press and fans aside, though, not everyone — mainly publishers — shared the studio’s faith.

Biting the worm

“We were so determined,” Colantonio says. “Now I think things have changed because there is the indie format, but back then you had 45 people to feed and it’s really hard to be hardheaded and keep the direction that you have in mind.”

Arkane started pitching The Crossing to publishers, but none were biting — at least not the whole worm. According to Antonov, Arkane pitched the game to all of the major publishers at the time, a pool that was about 20 companies deep. Each one, though, had its own trepidations about the project.

One major issue Arkane faced was its use of Valve’s Source engine, which wasn’t optimized for PlayStation 3. Arkane was developing The Crossing as a PC-first game. Though it eventually added Xbox 360 to development, at least two publishers, Colantonio says, weren’t willing to ship a game without a PlayStation 3 port.

And then there was matchmaking. Many publishers didn’t believe Arkane could pull it off well enough to work consistently.

“Back then, publishers were super terrified by the idea,” Colantonio says. “Without naming the publisher, they would bring 10, 15 people into the room and they would play the game and love it. But then always the same question would come up, which today would be a ridiculous question that nobody would be worried about. But back then it was: ‘How are you going to handle the matchmaking of such a system?”’

Grid View The Crossing concept art gallery Arkane Studios























In the early 2000s, he continues, Halo was the only series that had truly solved matchmaking. So Arkane consulted with former Bungie employee Max Hoberman — known as the person who cracked the code with Halo 2 — to work on The Crossing’s matchmaking, and Hoberman would come to pitch meetings and explain how the team was tackling the mechanic. But still, the worm rested, unbitten.

That’s not to say there weren’t offers. According to Colantonio, various publishers offered Arkane deals. But these always came at the cost of Arkane’s vision.

“One idea was to move the cross-player to another IP, and that would have killed me,” he says. “Another was to do a straight single-player version of The Crossing instead of doing what we were trying to do. That was not in the plan either. In this case, they [thought], ‘Maybe we can do something that costs less if it’s just single-player.’ If it was [just single-player], it was going to defeat the point.”

And cost was an issue, too. Colantonio says Arkane was seeking between $15 and $20 million to help cover development costs. A “very high” amount in 2006, he says.

The Crossing was a risk for publishers. It was a new take on video games from a studio not yet, as Colantonio says, “established” — one asking for more money than publishers felt comfortable with. “If [we’d tried] after a game like Dishonored then it would’ve been different for Arkane,” Colantonio says.

While Valve was involved in some ways — it helped Arkane with using the Source engine, and company head Gabe Newell even came to pitch meetings with Arkane — the company never signed on as publisher, says Colantonio.

“[I] don’t think they were yet, back then, in the business of publishing games,” Colantonio says. “Their approach was more: ‘We buy little companies’ or ‘We buy a team of four or five people,’ like Portal or the Left 4 Dead guys and the Dota guys, the Team Fortress [people]. That’s always been their model, which is a different model from publishing, I think. That was not what they wanted to do.”

Eventually, a publisher almost bit the worm. But it wanted a lot more than Arkane was willing to — or could — give.

For six months, Colantonio says, Arkane went back and forth negotiating with this publisher without ever striking a deal — each iteration on the contract was worse than the last, he says.

“The budget was actually going down, so we had to do the same with less,” he says. “In fact, we had to do more with less, because we also had to put the PS3 version in there that we had no idea how to do. So suddenly we were going to hire some genius programmers to start porting an engine that was not ours — that even the makers of the engine did not port themselves. It was just a crazy, crazy situation where it was going to lead us to failure.”

Colantonio declines to name the publisher. “I’m dying to say it because I’m just a dick like this. But I won’t,” he says, laughing.

“By the end of the six months of negotiations, the relationship was already so bad that it would not have made any sense — any sense — to start working together,” he says.

After years of passion and hard work, it was time for Arkane to walk away from The Crossing. Following six months of “torture,” according to Colantonio, he finally told the publisher no. And like that, Arkane cancelled The Crossing.

“We were so, so determined to do it, that for me to not do it [meant] that I knew in my heart there was a huge mistake. We were going to fail with this publisher,” Colantonio says. “For me to cancel the deal [meant] that I had zero-percent belief that we would pull it off with those conditions.”

“It was very satisfying because they had tortured us for six months. It was great,” he adds. “I think that publisher is no more; I think they went out of business. So, I guess there’s karma out there.”

[Update: After this story went live, Colantonio reached to say he misspoke, and that the publisher he mentions is still in business.]

“Nothing was wasted”

After walking away from the game, Arkane worked with EA on the Steven Spielberg game LMNO, another cancelled project. It continued contracting with Valve, too, behind the scenes. The Crossing, though, was always in the backs of many team members’ minds. When new employees would join Arkane, they’d ask to see the game. For years, Colantonio says, he would load up the playable demo, playing through matches with new hires.

The pain of walking away from such a passionate project, he says — one Arkane employees poured themselves into — lasted for years. “It took us Dishonored to truly heal from the fact that we never did The Crossing,” Colantonio says.

But the impact the game had on Arkane as a studio, both Colantonio and Antonov say, was immeasurable. The Crossing set the stage for the type of company Arkane would become in the future and the games it would produce. In 2012, it released the immersive sim Dishonored, quickly becoming a critical hit. Arkane doubled down on this style of game with a sequel in 2016 and a standalone expansion in 2017, Death of the Outsider, as well as the science fiction horror game Prey.

“It’s part of the DNA of Arkane,” Antonov says. “Nothing was wasted in this way, because people who were hired, the vision, the logic, the teambuilding, helped make The Crossing, helped make Prey, helped make all the Arkane games. The people that are there were formed and trained with this high-level vision.”

“Yeah, that’s very true. It calibrated us,” Colantonio says. “It was a learning [process] for everybody; it was a step toward success that came later.”

Neither Antonov nor Colantonio work for Arkane anymore. The former left after serving as visual design director on the first Dishonored, while the latter left in 2017 after shipping Prey. But they still emphasize how important The Crossing was to their careers, and to their futures.

Again, Colantonio compares The Crossing to an ex-girlfriend. Leaving the game behind was painful, he says, but it was a learning process. Now that all’s said and done, he wouldn’t go back, he says.

“After we were done with Dishonored there were questions about, ‘Hey. What should we do next,’” he says. “Every time someone would bring back The Crossing thing I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I loved it. I poured a lot of passion into it, but I think now I’ve moved on and I have some other things I want to make.”