The canceled Half-Life spinoff game – what could have been another episodic follow-up to Half-Life 2 – Ravenholm was just as good as you might have dreamed it to be, says the founder of its developer Arkane Studios Raphaël Colantonio, but it couldn't exist under Valve's high-speed business model.
"We needed another year – at least six months," Colantonio tells the Quad Damage Podcast in a new interview. "Valve had a very clear business plan for those Episodes. You know, they were trying to make the Episode business work, and they could not internally, because the costs were too high."
Colantonio has repeated the sentiment over the years, saying in a 2020 documentary about Arkane that Ravenholm – which was in development until 2007 – required "another year, and maybe at least the same amount of money, or a little bit less."
To Quad Damage, Colantonio explains that Valve gave Arkane "12 months," though "12 months to build anything is really, really hard. After 12 months, we had – frankly – an alpha. We had the entire game that was playable from beginning to the end, we had, like, one or two of the cinematographic moments that were really polished and very impressive."
In other words, the game "was great, frankly," Colantonio says. "I think the people at Valve who tried it, if they were asked, they would probably agree."
"But then we would have had to add another 6 months, maybe more, to make it where it should be," he shares. "So that was not going to work for Valve in terms of the business model that they wanted to put together."
Even so, Ravenholm became an important puzzle piece of Arkane's history.
"For us, it was still great" after being canceled, Colantonio tells Quad Damage, "because [there were] a lot of people that joined Arkane [who] wanted to try that Episode." Eventually, Ravenholm became "one of the rituals of when we had a new hire, for around those years anyway — they were going to playtest those games."
"People really loved them," Colantonio says, "it was a nice bonding experience."
