These are playgrounds for destruction and have all been designed by taking pieces of reality and mixing them up in humorous and beautiful chaos cocktails. All worlds with unique terrain, architecture, vehicles, and villains.

Speaking of simulations, our worlds have always been just as strong characters as Rico himself.

The more chaos you caused the more we rewarded you for it, because what can be more fun than blowing s**t up? Now the game had become a chaos simulator. We had a game that offered more autonomy than any other, which obviously inspired our players to live out those action-hero dreams they carried inside of them.Ĭausing chaos was a given, considering the tools at our players disposal, but the idea of actually making chaos into a game currency came in during the later phase of Just Cause 2. That all changed in Just Cause 2 when we attached the grappling hook to Rico’s arm. We had a little trouble getting over that hurdle that we needed to explain the rationale behind everything in the game. The grappling hook however, was invented quite late in the project and I have to give some of the credit to our former Executive Producer at Eidos (which today is Square-Enix), Martin Alltimes.īy this time, sometime in early 2004, we called it the Grapple Gun. The parachute was just a necessity from day one. That paved the way for a game where we needed lots and lots of vehicles of all kinds. Linus Blomberg, the other co-founder of Avalanche Studios, had this vision of a technology that could deliver infinite landscapes in explicit detail. It was something I had never seen in a game before. I wanted to make a game where players could skydive and land on a moving vehicle. My original vision for the game was really simple. Who cares, then, if he has a parachute that goes in and out of his back, if he shoots an infinite cord from his arm, if he jumps in and out of cars like a rubber man? It’s Just Cause!

Rico is really the ultimate action hero and even though our worlds are realistic, Rico can do things most action heroes only dream of. We’ve inspired developers to have their games less grounded in reality, because the opposite is so much fun. I also think Just Cause is important to the open-world genre, and I know that we have inspired a few games to let go a bit of that seriousness. With all its playfulness, colorfulness, and ultimate freedom, the game is a perfect metaphor for how we run Avalanche Studios. The way we approach game design, the way we work in our studio, how we are physically seated a lot of that comes from the philosophy behind designing Just Cause. Just Cause is so much more than a game to me. Three years later, Just Cause was released and we are now celebrating a decade of chaos. That’s the phrase that we used when we originally presented our first Just Cause game concept and design for the team at Eidos back in 2003.

Just cause 2 story