Monolith’s co-founder wants to reboot Condemned, but says “please have ZERO expectations”

Monolith Productions co-founder Jace Hall has expressed a strong interest in remaking rancid horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot. It’s not entirely clear how he’d do this, given that Monolith no longer exists even as a brand name, following cuts at parent company Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, and that Hall himself doesn’t seem to be directly involved with game development or publishing these days. That said, he is the sole current owner of the Condemned intellectual property. So if a remake is going to happen, it’ll need to happen through him.

All this comes in the form of a single tweet, following a grieving Monolith fan’s request to “make the Condemned 1 & 2 Remake & quite f**king around”. Hall responded: “I will see what may be possible. Absolutely no promises. Please have ZERO expectations. This will take me some time.”

Hall left Monolith in 2003 – two years before Criminal Origins launched on Xbox 360 – to work in an executive role at Warner. While at Warner, he co-led plans for a Condemned connected universe, spilling into the realm of film, but these ambitions never quite came to fruition. Hall departed Warner in 2008 to work at a string of outfits broadly concerned with game-as-service business models, entertainment production and esports.

Even as he has moved between roles, however, Hall hasn’t forgotten about Condemned. Back in 2015, he wrote on Facebook that “I am consistently asked when a third game might be created” and that he is “contemplating finding an interested and proven Indie development team AND PROVIDING IT TO THEM, so that they can take over the franchise and move it forward”.

Speaking to Ian Games subsequently, Hall reiterated that: “I am going to grant a license to use the Condemned franchise in general, and the chosen developer will be able to pick what kind of game they want to make. They can choose their vision of the content. They can build up momentum. Perhaps a prequel. Perhaps a simple mobile phone app for starters. It’s all on the table. I’m open to hearing new ideas.”

Would you like Condemned to return? I think Criminal Origins is a well-crafted horror game with excellently vicious and antsy melee combat, but “well-crafted”, here, risks being a justification for the fantasy of playing a cop who beats up homeless people and addicts with a pipe. That the cop’s victims have been mutated and driven berserk by a sci-fantasy McGuffin doesn’t really counter the argument that the game actively channels hatred towards the less fortunate, though Monolith are hardly the only horror game developers to do this.

I’m not sure which game developer I’d trust to bring Condemned back. I guess the quickfix corrective optics would be to turn the tables and have you fight a bunch of deranged and screaming police.