Monaco: Complete Edition for the Nintendo Switch is OUT NOW! Head to the eShop and download it!

A little background on why this may be the perfect platform for the game:

I originally conceived of Monaco as a console game way back in October of 2009. It was written in XNA, and at first it was a very small project that I intended to release on the Xbox 360’s indie game store, where self-publishing was allowed. Here’s what it looked like back then:

Surprising everyone, Monaco won the Grand Prize in the 2010 Independent Games Festival when it was just 15 weeks into development. I decided that the indie game store on XBLA was too small-fry for an IGF-winning game, but you needed to have a publisher to bring the game to the main XBLA storefront. So I brought it to Microsoft for a publishing deal where it was promptly rejected, saying that the visuals were offputting. So I went back into a work-hole for 6 months to improve the visuals and this is where I ended up:

I brought it back to Microsoft again and was rejected again. Not one to be defeated, I engaged my friends over at Empty Clip Studios to port the game to their in-house engine so I could bring the game to the PS3 instead. Sony, to their credit, was interested. I had the contract sitting on my desk, ready to sign, on the day of the infamous hack of PSN. PSN went down for a week, and it was my impression at the time that their audience never really recovered. So I decided to go look for a third party publisher to help me get the game onto the Xbox after all. This is when Majesco approached us while demoing the game at PAX. They would publish the game on the Xbox 360 while I would retain publishing rights on PC/Mac/Linux.

But the game development gods had more surprises in store for us. Two days before our launch day I started getting reports from reviewers that online games on the Xbox were disconnecting almost immediately. With the help of Microsoft engineers, we discovered that packet size limitations were different on their development network than on their live production network. I was forced to delay our XBox launch until the issue was fixed.

On April 24th, 2013, the game came out on Steam. We got incredible reviews from all the major publications. We had great sales numbers. But the game didn’t come out on the Xbox until April 27th. The Xbox missed the launch hype. And like with many online games, if your community numbers falter, the community dies entirely. The PC version sold around 1.7 million copies. The console version… far less.

Despite all the effort undertaken to get the game onto a console, despite the couch being the perfect place to play the game, Monaco on XBLA had flopped.

While I dreamed of bringing it to a handheld system in subsequent years, in particular the PS Vita, my experience with Xbox made me gunshy about spending the time and money. But the community of players around the Steam version continued to grow, with some players into the thousands of hours in the game.

And so, when the Switch was announced, it seemed like the perfect second chance for a console platform. Nintendo is known for their couch multiplayer games, the portability of the system is a dream, and our audience is hungry for another trip to Monaco. Sickhead Games, the guys responsible for the PS4 port of Tooth and Tail, helped us port it. And now it’s out.

Monaco, good luck on the respawn!