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Lorne Lanning laments 'The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot' that never was
Game Informer has posted its recent print interview with Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning, a (five-years-later) followup to the magazine's April 2005 announcement of The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot, OWI's would-be effort to delve further into the "more hardcore" elements of the Oddworld ... world. After finding the situation with EA (which published OWI's Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath on Xbox in 2005) "unworkable," Lanning recounted, OWI turned to Majesco to fund and publish the Fangus project, another Xbox game built on Stranger's core framework. But only a month after the game's announcement, "the shenanigans started" and OWI shut down its development studio. "Sometimes developers get fired by publishers and sometimes developers fire publishers," Lanning said coyly, "and that's probably all I should say about it." Publisher "incompetence" aside, Fangus did sound like an odd pitch: A "close to the Earth" dog-man herdsman turned "pit fighting" slave -- to the Russian-like cat mafia -- who escapes his years-long imprisonment a hardened killer dead set on vengeance and the liberation of his people ("the timeless mythical battle between cats and dogs," in other words). Also, Fangus has terminal rabies and "would control a flock of ravenous sheep-like creatures to take down enemies and solve puzzles," according to GI's description. "We wanted it to be really hardcore," Lanning concluded.
