In a recent developer lecture at the British Academy of Film and TV, Far Cry 5 director Dan Hay pitched a mission involving a misplaced space teddy bear.
Based on his childhood teddy bear, space and the story of Prometheus, he then went on to state that he wants to combine all these elements into one wherein he retells the story of Prometheus using a teddy bear while in space ‘because it’s f***ing awesome’.
Hay’s idea is as follows:
“It starts with a bear, and a little girl who loves her bear – in space, because it’s cool,” Hay began. “She lives out in space, she has normal parents, a normal life; she loves this bear, she has tea parties with this bear, she has birthdays with this bear […] She goes to bed every night knowing that this bear is there to protect her […] until one night she’s not protected.
“Danger strikes, a klaxon goes off. Her parents come running into the room […] they pick her up and they rush outside, and the bear is left in the bed. And she turns and she screams “No!” and she runs back, she grabs the bear, and they head to the spaceship. But at the last possible minute, she stumbles and she drops the bear. The doors close – fwoosh – and she sits there pressed up against it, screaming “No!” as the bear is left behind. And the rocket takes off and goes into space and gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
“And the bear sits alone on the edge of a great precipice until a gust of wind pushes it down. And down into the hole, it goes, further and further, past caves and monsters […] all kinds of things, until it finds its way all the way down into the centre of the planet and it rests in inky darkness alone until it sees a little light suspended from a little string.
“The light gets bigger until it presents itself as a little creature staring at this teddy bear. And this creature has a name – it’s called a Razagaboo. Now the Razagaboos are very inquisitive creatures […] but they’ve never left the cave, they never had any information about the world outside – they don’t know what this thing is.
“So this Razagaboo looks at it and offers a soft little purr to the other Razagaboos that are up in their webs, and they all come down. And they move forward, gingerly, carefully, looking at this bear – no clue what it is – forward and forward until they touch it.
“That’s when they have their Prometheus moment […] this is where, up until that moment, they’ve only ever thought of building their webs in 2D, but they saw that this thing was built out of yarn and they understood that it could be built in 3D, they could re-engineer what they build […] This changed everything about the Razagaboos – their understanding, their education, the idea of their culture, and the idea of their engineering.”
The game would feature various challenges and puzzles and it would be ‘quite the experience’ for any player.
The most important question relating to this is whether it would ever come to light though. Ubisoft is known for their bigger titles such as Assassin’s Creed, but they have published smaller titles such as Valiant Hearts too. Hay hopes that one day his game, which he named ‘Yarn’, will one day be published. Time will tell.
