“If I could tell you the game that I turned down twice, it would shock the world,” claims Tim Willits, chief creative officer of Saber Interactive.
The multi-studio developer has become famous of late for its impressive collection of existing IP video game adaptations, primarily taking the form of playable versions of popular film series such as The Evil Dead and upcoming John Wick, Hellraiser: Revival, and Jurassic Park: Survival, but also tabletop games in the case of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
Saber is an incredibly busy, and productive, company, seemingly suffering from its own success to a certain degree, inasmuch as it can’t take on all of the dream projects it would like to. As Willits told IGN in a recent interview, “I can’t say it, but there’s a game that they came to me twice, and so it’s my ‘like someday in the future, I will brag about it’. I can’t say it now because I’ll get in trouble, but it’s the coolest IP ever, and I can’t make the game because we just have too much going on.”
Such is Saber’s commitment to translating movie licenses into video games, that it now finds itself in a situation where rights holders are coming to it in order to pitch games, rather than the other way around.
“Now they come to us,” reveals Willits. “We’ve had so much success with our past IPs and our license collaborations that big studios are coming to us. I mean, again, I’m not going to give you any specific examples, but some of the really biggest titles that we have, they came to us and it goes to show you that media companies, they know that gaming is the future and there are so many good properties in the world and there are just not enough good teams to make great games. So when you prove yourself that you can take and respect a license, and you respect an IP, and you make a great game, everyone else wants to work with you. So everybody has called us and wants to work with us.”
Willits appears to find the challenge of working with existing IPs highly satisfying, not only because it’s enjoyable to play around in these already established universes and unlock the fun, but also because there’s already a huge fanbase to target your game towards.
“It is actually really exciting,” states Willits. “As someone who’s created my own IPs and someone who’s now worked with all these great IPs, it is truly exciting. I personally feel it’s actually much better because you have millions of fans, you know the world that you can get into, but you still need to make a good game, and that is critical.”
That last part is crucial, because Saber isn’t in the business of ‘easy cash-ins’, but instead dedicated to crafting unique game experiences inside of these worlds. The IP and licenses are all a very cool base point, but Willits and the team’s focus is always primarily on creating a great game first and foremost.
“At Saber, we have embraced big licenses,” explains Willits. “I believe that we have more licensed products in development now than any other developer in the world. We have things we haven’t even announced yet. One of the great things about Sabre is that we are an independent company, so we work well with every license holder. We have a great relationship with Universal, Lionsgate, and Disney. And if you have a talented development team, and if you focus on gameplay and making the experience as rich as possible, you can take all the advantages of having a licensed property and that built-in fan base and be really successful with it.”
What IP would you love to see Saber take on next? Let us know in the comments! For more from our interview with Saber’s Tim Willits, you can find some new details about the upcoming John Wick game, confirmation that the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is still in development, and the news that extreme horror game Hellraiser: Revival has secured its ESRB rating.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
