‘I think the franchise is dead’: Saints Row design director says IP owner ‘ghosted’ his prequel pitch
Chris Stockman said last year that he had been asked to pitch a prequel to Embracer Group
The design director of the original Saints Row says he fears the series is over, claiming his pitch for a potential prequel is being ignored by the IP’s owner Embracer Group.
Last November, Chris Stockman – who was design director on the first Saints Row before leaving Volition, and now works for VR studio Bit Planet Games – posted on the Saints Row Reddit page that he was planning to propose a prequel to the original game.
“Guys and gals, I have hopeful news,” Stockman wrote at the time. “I’ve been asked to create a pitch for a Saints Row reboot. I can’t say anything more than that but my dreams for this game just became a little more than just dreams.”
However, as spotted by X user @paparpg, Stockman recently revealed on Discord that Embracer wasn’t listening to his proposal and that he believed the series may be done.
Replying to another user who claimed the last “canon” Saints Row was released a decade ago, Stockman replied: “Yeah, and honestly, I think the franchise is dead, unfortunately.
“I get the sense that Embracer has zero ability to do anything with it. I wish things were different. I tried my best to offer a path forward but they’ve ghosted me.”
The original Saints Row, which was an Xbox 360 exclusive released in 2006, was generally well-received as a solid alternative to the Grand Theft Auto series, which was still two years away from entering the HD era with GTA 4.
Subsequent sequels became progressively more comedic, until series developer Volition decided to reboot the game in 2022. The reboot received mixed reviews at launch, with VGC’s Saints Row review labelling the game a “buggy, dull mess”. It currently has scores of 61-65 on the review aggregation site Metacritic.
In an interview last October, Stockman shared his ideas for a potential Saints Row prequel set in the ’70s, while criticising the 2022 reboot, which he called “a terrible idea”.
“What is it trying to be?” he asked. “You’re rebooting it, but why are you rebooting it? There’s a lot of characters in the series that people love. It wasn’t Saints Row at all. Just call it something else at that point. There’s a level of expectations for a Saints Row game, and they missed the mark on all of them.
“What I would have done was to take the franchise back to the ’70s and do a period piece, a prequel of how the gangs from the first one started. You’re running around with a crew of teens that ended up as the main characters for the first game. You could really go all in on the ’70s theme with big Afros, bell-bottoms, and the music of that whole period.”
