“People want to play arcade racers again” – How the developer of Wreckreation went from a company-wide redundancy notice to working on a sequel

When we last heard from Fiona Sperry in December, she had just put the entire team at Three Fields Entertainment on notice of redundancy.

The studio had released driving game Wreckreation barely six weeks previously. But in a LinkedIn post, Sperry – who was previously studio head at Burnout maker Criterion – explained that Three Fields would “not see revenue from game sales for the foreseeable future,” and that without “the enthusiasm or financial support from our publisher [THQ Nordic] to continue development, we simply cannot sustain the studio in its current form.”

Eight months later, a lot has changed. “As it turned out, I didn’t make any redundancies,” Sperry tells GamesIndustry.biz.

She went public early about the risk of job losses as a way to raise awareness of the crisis Three Fields found itself in. “I thought, well, no one can help us if they don’t know we need helping,” she says. “It was shit timing because it was before Christmas.”

In response, several people suggested starting a Patreon for Wreckreation, and Sperry noted the game Paralives from Alex Massé had found success through its Patreon programme. “And so we said, ‘Well, do you know what? We’ll give it a go’.” The company launched its Patreon the same month.

“Then in January, the team all came back from Christmas and they were like, ‘Look, we want to carry on.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit risky, because basically we’ve got about three months’ worth of money. So we can give it a go, but obviously what we’re risking is your redundancy money’.”

But the plan worked. Thanks to Patreon funds donated by more than a thousand backers, Three Fields was able to continue working on Wreckreation, ultimately delivering eighteen updates to fix problems like the cars’ handling (an issue that was picked up on in reviews).

Now, Wreckreation 2 has been announced. But it’s being made by a completely different company – When Tides Turn. So what’s going on?

End of the road

Sperry calls the last year “one of the most commercially challenging periods in my career,” a time when she was worrying whether the company would even be able to make payroll. Wreckreation was released even though the team knew it had problems. “We were aware of all our issues, but we got to a point where we had to publish it,” she says. “We’d had to make decisions that we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise if we didn’t have to get a game out and just get money in the door.”

There were misaligned expectations, too. “I think people were expecting a kind of Burnout-style game, and we made a game that was more about an exploration of freedom and creativity in racing games, which perhaps wasn’t what people wanted.”

Sperry says she “immediately got on Discord” at launch and started talking to players, some of whom were initially cynical. But gradually, Three Fields was able to build, and in some cases rebuild, the relationship with its player base, to the point where Wreckreation 2 is now on the cards.

“If you’d said to me in January we’d be here now in July having announced a sequel, and having actually a lot of support from our players… It’s been quite a journey.”

But the sequel isn’t being made by Three Fields – it’s being made by a new company called When Tides Turn, which has Sperry as its sole director. (Three Fields was originally founded in 2014 by Sperry and Alex Ward, creative director for the Burnout games, who has now taken a step back from the games business.)

Three Fields is still going, Sperry explains. “It’s still the home of those old games,” she says, which include titles like Dangerous Golf and Dangerous Driving, along with Wreckreation. “So if we do any more updates on Wreckreation 1, it would be done under the Three Fields name.”

However, no one works there anymore. “All of the team have been transferred to the new company,” she says. “I remain as a director of both, but they are separate entities.”

Sperry says there are a few reasons for starting a new firm. One is to do something completely on her own. “It’s the first time I’ve started a studio,” she says, adding that the name is intentional. “It’s evocative of how I feel that tides have turned, and looking back over my quite long career and feeling like it’s a new start.”

The sequel dilemma

When Tides Turn is able to make a sequel to Wreckreation because “we essentially sold the [IP] rights from one company to another company,” explains Sperry. As to why, the answer is a little more complex.

“People say, ‘Why are you doing this rather than continue with Wreckreation 1?'” says Sperry. “And it’s like, well, we continued with Wreckreation 1 as long as we could. We did 18 updates. Six of them were content packs, the other 12 were fixes and improvements and things people were asking for.