Some video game flops feel like historic events. Concord, Sony’s failed multiplayer shooter that shut down after a few weeks on the market, was such a devastating failure that it earned mythical status. (A group of developers didn’t reverse engineer the dead game and revive its servers because it was fun to play.)
Other flops aren’t so romantic. For every Concord, there are 100 multiplayer shooters that quietly failed to find an audience and went offline in silence. They’re not remembered today. No one is making YouTube retrospectives about their failure or trying to bring them back online. These are the true disasters, with so little cultural cache to their name that they practically disappeared into the ether. Radical Heights is one of those flops.
In 2018, a struggling video game studio was in dire need of a hit. Boss Key Productions, a studio created by Gears of War designer Cliff Blezinski and Guerilla Games co-founder Arjan Brussee, had just tried and failed to break into the competitive shooter market with LawBreakers. But the trendiness of Overwatch didn’t rub off on LawBreakers, which landed as a commercial failure.
Boss Key needed a Hail Mary to recover. It looked to the multiplayer shooter space once again to find the next big thing, and it just so happened that there was another genre-defining trend happening as LawBreakers was failing to capitalize on the hero shooter: battle royale
The iron was hot thanks to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, so Boss Key struck as fast as it could. Blezinski’s team rushed together a riff on the battle royale format called Radical Heights and, in 2018, launched it into “X-Treme Early Access,” well before it was ready to see the light of day. The shooter pretty much followed PUBG’s formula to a T, with players dropping into a map, represented as a checkered grid, and collecting as much gear as possible in an attempt to survive and become the last person standing. The twist was that the whole project had a 1980s theming to it, as players competed in a retro game show with plenty of quirky design choices that set it apart from PUBG.
At a distance, it looked like a derivative cash-in. The rushed launch didn’t help, as it was clear that Boss Key was trying to capitalize on a moment with an unfinished game that felt like a pre-alpha build. (You couldn’t even play as a female character in the game at launch, as the feature was listed as “coming soon.”) But there was unexpected potential in the idea.
I played Radical Heights in 2018. A lot of it, in fact: I was absolutely hooked on it. Part of that just spoke to the strength of the battle-royale concept at the time. The elimination format was an ingenious invention, creating room for emergent storytelling in a multiplayer game while also allowing players to move on from a bad round quickly rather than forcing them to suffer through a deathmatch squash until the timer ran out. Radical Heights understood the power of that idea and reinforced it with some surprisingly snappy gunplay.
But Radical Heights’ strengths weren’t just owed to the games it was aping; it was genuinely inventive in moments. Its smartest innovation came from its use of sound. A battle royale round can be pindrop silent at times, as you spend a lot of time in a round quietly searching for loot. Firing a gun makes you a target, since everyone nearby will instantly know where you are. Radical Heights doubled down on that risk-reward dynamic and tension in several ways. My favorite example came in the form of prize doors. During rounds, you could find storage units filled with loot. To open them, you’d have to stand on a panel for a bit of time to unlock them. The catch? A tacky game show ditty blared from a speaker any time someone stood on the pressure pad. That didn’t just tell other players where you were; it let them know the location of some serious loot, too. Squad shootouts were inevitable if you dared to go for the big prizes, encouraging players to funnel towards action rather than lurk in the shadows.
There were plenty of those creative touches in the early draft of the game. Money collected through a round couldn’t just be used to purchase loot from vending machines; it could also be banked at an ATM and pulled out for use in later rounds. Items like inflatable decoys gave rounds a strategic wackiness that the much straighter-laced PUBG lacked. You could ride around town on a BMX bike, giving players a stealthy way to traverse the map, whereas other games pushed you into loud, large vehicles. And, of course, you could do all of that while wearing radical 80s fashion that gave the game a distinct look. It was a mess, but one full of little delights that showed potential.
That potential never materialized. The game was an immediate flop to the point that Boss Key shut down altogether just one month after the game’s launch. Even as someone who believed in Radical Heights at the time, I wasn’t surprised. There might have been a great shooter in it down the line, but the early access play reeked of desperation. Every good idea was buried beneath barely half-baked execution. To make matters worse, it launched in that sorry state with microtransactions in tow. Boss Key was putting the cart well before the horse at a time, post-LawBreakers, when goodwill was at an all-time low. Radical Heights died a quiet death in just one month and cleared the way for Fortnite to dominate.
I still miss it today, even if I’ve accepted the fact that it was janky beyond belief. The peak of battle royale’s power gave us a rat race that showcased the iterative joy of gaming, as studios tried to creatively one-up one another. The most expensive attempts won out, with Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Warzone having enough AAA sheen to crush the misfits, but I still have a soft spot for Radical Heights’ spunky spirit. Every once in a while, I find myself wondering how high Boss Key could have climbed if it had enough financial runway to take off. Every multiplayer crash leaves behind a tantalizing mystery of what could have been in its aftermath.
