Saints Row's original creator says the reboot was "a terrible idea"

Three years ago, it was finally time for the big comeback of Saints Row, a favourite that players had been asking about for years. But instead of continuing the story or trying something new with it, Volition decided to reboot the series, and ended up with a pretty lukewarm product that shared very little DNA with the Saints Row series that people loved.

The flop was soon a fact, and together with the crisis for Embracer Group, it ended with the entire studio being shut down... and it is very uncertain whether we will ever see Saints Row again.

Esports Insider interviewed Chris Stockman, a gentleman who knows a thing or two about the game series. He was the creator of Saints Row and the game designer for the original 2006 release. He is not impressed with the work that went into the reboot and believes it was a long series of bad decisions:

"When I found out that they were rebooting Saints Row, I spoke to an old friend of mine who was my old boss for Saints Row 1. He was the producer, and I was learning about what they were doing, and I thought, man, this is a terrible idea.

"What is it trying to be? 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."

Stockman also offers his own suggestion on how Volition should have moved forward with the series, and instead of a reboot (or yet another sequel), he thinks they should have taken a step back. A big one. He explains:

"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.

"I'd have taken it in a different direction so you're not competing with the modern-day GTA games. You're zagging when everyone else is zigging, so to speak."

And we're not the only ones who think this sounds like a much better idea, right? It actually seems like he's thought about it again, saying that Embracer Group should contact him and he'll put the game together with large parts of the original team:

"[Embracer Group], if you're listening to this, contact me. Let's go. I can bring much of the old band back together who worked on Saints Row 1. I could turn that IP around with a decent budget. They don't even have to fund it. I could get other outside people to fund it. I could turn the franchise around. I know I could."

It seems doubtful that Embracer Group would be willing to invest in Saints Row again, but let's keep our fingers crossed that the series one day will return from the dead.