Crash Bandicoot's near inclusion, nonstop leaks and a failed Rival Schools project - What happened to PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale?
Matt McMuscles takes a deep dive on the project with probably the worst timing imaginable
Years before Rivals of Aether and Brawlhalla would carve out success in the platform fighting game genre building off the backs of Super Smash Bros., Sony attempted their own ill-fated title that was probably one of the unluckiest projects in modern video games.
Content creator Matt McMuscles recently put PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale under the microscope in the latest episode of his What Happened? series with a former Superbot developer shedding extra light on the multitude of rumors surrounding the failed fighter.
Starting out as a dream project over at Naughty Dog, PSABR was instead put in the hands of a brand new studio with Superbot put up to the challenging task on a very tight budget.
The game was plagued with leaks months before PSABR was even announced publicly with the entire base roster getting out early due to data mining which would be one of the most criticized aspects of the fighter.
According to the anonymous developer, most of the rumors we've heard for years about the roster were indeed true.
Crash Bandicoot was very close to making it in, but Activision wanted too much money in return though Lara Croft was more a victim of bad timing with the reboot about to release around the same time.
They also confirm that negotiations with Square Enix did in fact occur, but it's believed that the Final Fantasy makers were wary of lending their support to a brand new team on an unproven project.
For all of its troubles, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was ahead of its time with crossplay between the PS3 and Vita while still managing to reach over 1 million copies sold in its launch window. That wasn't enough to keep Sony from pulling the plug, however.
Superbot no longer found themselves with the support from PlayStation, so they shopped around for future projects before shutting down completely.
One of those projects was allegedly a new game in the Rival Schools series or a spiritual successor which you can hear more about plus other interesting facts in Matt's deep dive below.
