Back in July 2015, Sony Interactive Entertainment made headlines by trademarking a game named “Gnomageddon.” There was a lot of speculation on what the game was about, and I even saw crazy articles alleging that it was Sucker Punch’s yet unannounced new game.
The game was in fact a much smaller project, as most probably imagined from the name. According to a new video by video game researcher and archivist Liam Robertson over at DidYouKnowGaming?, It was greenlighted at Sony San Diego together with its now discontinued action game Kill Strain, and the studio allocated a very small team of developers (never more than eleven people) to work on it.
Like Kill Strain, Gnomageddon was planned to be a free to play game with microtransactions, to be released some time this year. It had three modes, a versus mode similar to a team deathmatch, “holdout” was a horde mode, while “raid” was another co-op mode, but saw the players on the offensive against enemy gnomes controlled by the AI.
Players could choose among six different classes of gnomes (fighter, tank, assassin, mage, marsksman and support), each equipped with different weapons and equipment. The game even had an asynchronous mode allowing you to collect gnomes and send them on missions on your behalf.
The video also provides more insight on the recent demise of Sony San Diego’s sub-studio that worked on Kill Strain and Gnomageddon itself, after the first game failed to bring in the revenue that Sony expected. By extension, it also paints a rather detailed the picture of the publisher’s incursion into the games-as-a-service realm, that peaked at the beginning of the PS4’s life cycle.
You can check out the video below, even if you should keep in mind that videos like this are created mostly thanks to reports from developers that worked on the project, so there are possibly other sides to the story that will remain untold.