AFTER EARTH

HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER’s inspirations are rooted in terra firma

- Jeremy Peel

Sometimes a name simply drifts through space, awaiting the perfect project to dock with. Blade Runner was originally the title ofa little known 1974 sci-fi novel about a black market medical equipment supplier – until Ridley Scott bought the rights, keeping the name and jettisoning everything else.

Similarly, the name ‘Shipbreaker’ pre-exists the game it now so perfectly describes. Hardware: Shipbreakers was originally the working title of Deserts of Kharak, the Homeworld RTS that became Blackbird Interactive’s first release. It was years later that Blackbird would develop a game about shearing huge chunks of metal from the carcasses of starships – but even then, somehow, the team missed the title that was staring them in the face.

“We ran a bunch of internal focus groups trying to figure out what the name of the game was,” art director Chris Williams remembers. “We invested a lot of time into it. And there was a moment where a bunch of people came up with ‘Shipbreaker’. We made a game that coincidentally hit that.”