Mega Man was plagued with meddling from the get-go. ![]() The only request Activision made was the subtitle - "Shadows Die Twice" was intended to merely be the Tag Line for the teaser trailer. Thankfully, Activision was more or less entirely hands off with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, basically letting FromSoftware do their thing. ![]() Given the fact that Activision and Vicarious Visions feared the content might have been considered "insensitive", their meddling was obvious. After the events of 9/11, the game was pulled from shelves (it had been released in North America in late August) and delayed in territories where it hadn't been released, and the level designers placed a bridge between the two towers to make the comparison to its real life counterpart less obvious. This is confirmed by the original level title, "Top of the World", and dialogue spoken by Peter Parker during the original cinematic prior to the final level. The PlayStation game Spider-Man 2 Enter: Electro had the final level originally take place on the top of the World Trade Center.Naturally, they weren't completely done with some form of meddling after the move - see the EA folder for more. Activision dropped Brütal Legend entirely, and it was later picked up by Electronic Arts. (Activision, as a response, claimed it was axed because it was over budget and late with everything and what they had, wasn't very good.) As a result of this, Tim Schafer estimated that the game was only one third as large as it was intended to be. Brütal Legend was treated so badly by Activision that Double Fine claimed that Activision was purposely sabotaging the game in order to preserve its Guitar Hero franchise, which was on its way out of popularity. One of its publishers, Activision, attempted to turn the game into a Guitar Hero sequel, among other things. Brütal Legend was affected by executive meddling quite badly.On a lighter note, the reason there hasn't been a Call of Duty movie yet is not because no studios want a go at it, but rather because Activision, fearful of the usual reputation video game-based movies have and how that would affect the franchise, has shot down every offer.Neversoft, another Activison studio most famous for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was shuttered and merged into Infinity Ward in 2014.Activision is as of this writing, still releasing Call of Duty games on an annual basis, rotating between three internal Activision studios: Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and (for a time) Sledgehammer Games.Although Respawn was purchased by EA in 2017, the publisher largely avoided interfering with Respawn's projects, possibly because EA is afraid of pissing off Zampella again. West left the studio shortly after the founding and went to work for Epic Games in 2019. Zampella, West, and roughly three-quarters of IW's staff left the company afterwards (including most of the creative and writing team behind the Modern Warfare series) and went to form Respawn Entertainment, creators of Titanfall and Apex Legends.This incident caused a number of major knock-on effects: Depending on whose story you choose to believe, Zampella and West apparently started talking to other game developers (which Activision frowned upon), which caused their dismissal, or they were held in their offices by security and interrogated (along with their colleagues) because of their refusal to follow Activision's demands. ![]() That was supposed to be the full title until Activision forced Call of Duty onto the package to retain brand identity, despite Infinity Ward intending Modern Warfare to be a Spin-Off. Given eighteen months to work on a title they didn't want to do in the first place, they made Modern Warfare 2.
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