Last year, Spanish developers Tequila Works cancelled a game, laid off staff, and finally filed for insolvency in the face of “prolonged market conditions”, after losing funding from Tencent. Founders Raúl Rubio and Luz Sancho departed the studio in the process.
Now, what’s left of Tequila are selling off all their assets in an open auction, including both published games like horror platformer Deadlight, and a number of projects that were either in development or “ready for production”. It all makes for a sad anatomy of the studio that gave us the wonderful Rime.
Going by the auction listings on Escrapalia, Tequila Works had plenty on the boil. The first in-development project listed is The Ancient Mariner, “an open-world narrative action adventure, focused on human emotions as the driving force of the gameplay”. Clunky elevator pitch notwithstanding, this sounds like a follow-up to Rime, in that both projects reference Coleridge’s poem Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. If you’ve completed Rime you’ll know that the poetic parallel here goes beyond the title.
The second project listed is Dungeon Tour, which sounds a lot more lighthearted. It’s described as “a conceptual mix between Overcooked and Dungeon Keeper” for up to four players. The premise is that you’re guiding sightseers around procedurally generated catacombs. What if Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli had to shepherd a bunch of goofs wearing fanny packs with Goblin phrasebooks? What if Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but with a group of retirees in palm-print shirts rather than a rolling ball of fire? Yeah, I could see myself having fun with that.
Lastly, there’s Brawler Crawler, which was to be about developing a combat style in a “chaotic urban universe” of procedurally generated streets. This is the only one of the three in-dev projects that’s described as having been cancelled in the auction, so perhaps this is the game Tequila Works shelved last November.
Four other “unreleased video game concepts” are mentioned in the listing, each consisting of “creative, narrative and visual documentation, and reserved rights”. They are Frozen Outpost, Mr. Bones, Hungry Cities, and Under A Logger’s Moon.
The auction naturally doesn’t detail the fates of Tequila Works staff following last year’s bankruptcy announcement – at the time, they were expected to “fulfil their responsibilities” according to Eurogamer.es sources, despite management not necessarily having the ability to pay them. Since then, several Tequila members have posted that they’re looking for new work on LinkedIn, amongst them senior sound designer Jose Luis Lara Romero and senior game designer David Canela Lagunas.
Others have posted tributes about their time working for or with Tequila. “They found me at a time when I was losing faith in my own career,” writes Rob Yescombe, who was freelance narrative director and writer on Rime and VR game The Invisible Hours. “We made two wonderful games together, that have stood the test of time.”
Best of luck to all Tequila Workers who are still looking for a new home.
