“Journey to the Savage Planet” developers reform after Google shutdown

Typhoon Studios employees, the developer behind Journey to the wild planet, are reformed under the name Raccoon Logic. In an announcement, the team said it needed to “boldly return to where it was before,” Google’s doomed acquisition of the company. Raccoon Logic also revealed that the team bought out the rights to Wild planet, allowing them to “embark on new adventures in the action-adventure space”.

Typhoon was founded in 2017 by a group of Montreal-based gaming executives, including Far cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson and Knight of arkham executive producer Reid Schneider. Their first title was Journey to the wild planet, a satirical sci-fi game for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch first released in January 2020.

In 2019, Typhoon was acquired by Google as part of its efforts to acquire proprietary content for its nascent Stadia streaming service. Unfortunately, at the start of 2021, Google’s notoriously impatient management decided to change strategy, shut down its premier board game division and lay off employees.

This decision would prove problematic in the short term, because Journey to the wild planet encountered revolutionary bugs that Google had to race to find a way to fix them. And left the future of the Savage Planet franchise and the careers of those Typhoon employees in the balance.

In a statement, Raccoon Logic said it had received a “pivotal investment” from Tencent that will fund its unannounced first project. Alex Hutchinson says the support from Tencent is a “huge boost, which means we can do some important work on our own before we start talking to editors.” Reid Schneider, meanwhile, thanks 505 Games, which published Wild planet, and added that he planned to “build on the journey to the Wild planet franchise in the future.