I don’t know the numbers, but I’m certain the first Mercenaries sold well over a million copies - maybe more than two million. Incidentally, this was a time when Pandemic could almost do no wrong. The company had hit after hit, with Full Spectrum Warrior, Star Wars Battle Front 1 and 2, Destroy All Humans, and Mercenaries, each selling over a million units. With such success, the natural next step for Mercenaries was obvious: make a sequel.

And so, after a bit of between-project limbo in which some of the Mercs team helped with Destroy All Humans, and others (including myself) worked on a prototype for Saboteur (using the mercs 1 engine), we got properly started on Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

In my post on Mercenaries, I mentioned that it was a great production but it gave me false expectations on how game development usually went. Well, I got a good corrective data point soon after with Mercenaries 2. It seems that nearly everything that went smoothly with Mercenaries 1, was faced with friction and difficulties on Mercenaries 2. Ask 20 people on the dev team why they think that is, and you’ll probably get 20 different answers, but for me, I think the large overriding culprit was simply not adapting.

You see, when you have five 1-million+ selling hits in a row, you are definitely doing something right. However, that tends to hide the fact that you are also doing some things wrong. Every team is. It also tends to build a certain hubris and calcify your processes, good-and-bad, and so when we moved to the newest platforms, we ended up using last-gen methods and ideas to make next-gen games. We faced (but were slow to recognize) the fact that minor problems became major ones at scale. For example: if, on a 50 man team, leadership deficits could be smoothed over by a strong creative director, that doesn’t mean that same CD can fill the gaps of a 100+ man team. And if on PS2-generation hardware, it made sense for every team to create their own game engines, it does not mean that remained a good idea on PS3 and Xbox 360 - in fact, it was a terrible idea.

There were other causes of course, and again, other folks have their own interpretations on what mattered most. All this said though, and to be fair to Pandemic and the Mercenaries 2 team, these mistakes were easily made in context. Making games is hard, and really, making the generation leap is especially difficult, for any company - as is surviving your own success.

In the end, I’m happy to have been on the project. As with anything, if things are always great and everything comes easy, you’ll learn very little. But more than just silver lining, I genuinely appreciated and enjoyed working with everyone on the team. I still connect with friends from that era and I suspect we will all remain in touch for the rest of our professional careers and beyond.