The Indie Game Magazine March 2015 | Issue 47 | Page 16

FEATURE INTERVIEW

D

inosaurs. Modern society has always been fascinated by dinosaurs. Despite how little we actually know
about them even after centuries or research (Remember when the adult Triceratops was a thing? Did the
T-Rex actually have feathers?), we’re absolutely enamored
by what I would call “Hollywood’s interpretation of dinosaurs.” Which is good news for the Expansive Worlds team,
as they are developing a new project in the same vein as
their popular title, theHunter.

Dubbed theHunter Primal, this new adventure will introduce
a concept fans of the original have been begging for since it
first released back in 2009. That concept, of course, is hunting dinosaurs. What started out as a little bit of fun between
interns while playing around in theHunter’s engine has since
turned into a full-scale project completely standalone from
theHunter, and I got the chance to chat with Expansive
Worlds CEO Pim Holfve about how the game is shaping up
post-Early Access release on Steam. The results are, shall we
say, Pre-historic? Perhaps Jur-classic? Something like that…

Expansive Worlds Interview: Dino Power
about hunting dinosaurs. We’ve never seen
it as a possibility since our ambition with
theHunter is to make the most realistic hunting experience possible, and dinosaurs don’t
really have a place in that universe.

Indie Game Magazine: theHunter: Primal
began life as a small distraction for a couple
interns having some fun with the game engine. Can you explain how the game grew
from there?
Pim Holfve: Pretty much from the start of
theHunter we’ve gotten random requests

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But when we launched theHunter on Steam,
the number of Dino requests went nuts, and
at the same time a couple of our interns had
started to play around with a T-Rex in the
engine. So seeing that there was a possible
audience and that dinosaurs looked pretty
awesome in theHunter I felt this could actually work, so I asked the design team to start
digging into it and they came up with really
great stuff. And since the whole team was
super excited about the project, it seemed

The Indie Game Magazine

by Vinny Parisi
as if all the stars were finally aligned.
IGM: Why did you feel Primal needed to be
its own separate, standalone experience?
Pim: As I mentioned earlier, theHunter is
all about realistic modern day hunting, so
dinosaurs aren’t really a match for that.
Many of our core theHunter players play the
game due to it being the closest thing to a
hunting simulator there is, and we want to
keep it that way for them. We also wanted
to try a business model that we hadn’t explored before; theHunter is a F2P game with
a membership option, and that model has
suited the game well since it was released
in 2009 as a rather small experience with
only one hunting reserve and two animals.