Ready at Dawn, a now-shuttered studio that was acquired by Meta in 2020 and shut down in 2024, has a long history in game development. While never quite a AAA studio, the Irvine, California-based developer worked on games like Daxter, God of War spin-offs, and the highly successful VR titles Lone Echo and Echo Arena. The latter titles got the attention of Oculus Studios under Meta, prompting their acquisition.
Before the Meta acquisition, Ready at Dawn created multiple titles under different publishers, most often PlayStation. In an interview with MinnMax, Ready at Dawn co-founder Andrea Pessino spoke candidly about working with these different publishers, including a doomed project with French video game developer and publisher Ubisoft.
“We had a whole stint with a different project we were making with Ubisoft,” Pessino says. “I’ll tell you another time,” he follows up, before being cajoled by host Ben Hanson to speak about it now.
Pessino relates a story where Ready at Dawn was making a game for Ubisoft and having monthly meetings in Paris that included Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. During one meeting, the developers at RAD received notes from the publisher about changes the publisher wished to see from the game. After a lot of praise about the game, the list of changes included that the young woman protagonist the developers were intending on was not, by Pessino’s recollection, “badass.” Ubisoft wanted the developers to change it to a man. “To which we had to hold in the puke,” Pessino added.
Ready at Dawn then chose to exercise an escape clause in their contract while work on the game was still early and cancel the project on their end.
While Pessino does not state a specific time this happened, he indicates this project was between the two God of War titles that Ready at Dawn had developed for the PSP. This would put their project for Ubisoft somewhere around 2008 – 2010. A 2020 article from Bloomberg reported that Ubisoft would often intervene in games in development around the described time to prevent women from being sole protagonists of games to ensure they sell better.
“That’s not gonna fly,” Pessino says of the publisher interference.
