Denis Dyack talks Too Human, Litigation, and More

When Too Human released back in 2008, it was met with mediocre sales and poor critical reviews. Though many feel that developer Silicon Knights’ future was in peril, company founder and president Denis Dyack is still anticipating a happy ending.

“I think as long as Silicon Knights is still around there is still hope,” Dyack told Games Industry International.  “You know, in some ways Too Human got a bad rap, and there are all kinds of details. A lot of what happened with Too Human is going to come out in the court case, which is May 14.”

The court case which Dyack is referring to involves Silicon Knights and Epic Games, the creators of the Unreal Engine. Dyack and Silicon Knights have accused Epic of providing less than adequate support for the Unreal Engine during Too Human’s development. The lawsuit alleges that Epic instead chose to focus their resources towards Gears of War, much to Too Human’s detriment.

“Bottom-line, and this is pretty public, we went through hell last generation by trying to adopt the Unreal Engine,” Dyack stressed. “It hurt us so dramatically that it affected us a lot, all the way through.” It is important to note that Dyack refers to this current generation as “last generation”. This is because Silicon Knights, like many other companies, is already developing for the next generation of consoles.

“We’re really excited and we’re working on our next generation stuff,” Dyack said, refusing to go into detail. “We’re working on an IP that’s our most requested and we’re really excited about that. We’re smaller, obviously, and we’re going back to our roots.”

“That’s the current state of things. I think the state of our demise has been greatly exaggerated. Here we are. We’re here.”