Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly's Troubled Development, Explained - CBR - Comic Book Resources

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After the release of Year of the Dragon in 2000, Insomniac Games moved on from Spyro the Dragon. Universal officially owned the IP, and Insomniac opted to leave the little purple dragon they had created behind to pursue new creative endeavors. The team would produce the beloved Ratchet & Clank series with Sony, and Spyro's future was left up in the air.

Eager to continue producing Spyro games, Universal would soldier on without Insomniac. It was time for Spyro to make his way to the next generation of consoles and for him to appear on non-Sony home consoles for the first time. The resulting game was Enter the Dragonfly, a name that sends a shiver down the spine of any fan of the series. What on earth happened?

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Universal handed development duties for this new Spyro title to a pair of rather new development studios: Check Six Studios and Equinoxe Digital Entertainment. Universal was very involved in the game's production, altering much of the team's original vision into something else entirely. Universal's interference mandated that the project be entirely restarted a month into production, setting the tone for the kind of development process that would take place. Nearly every element of the game's initial design documents would be scrapped and replaced. The game would miss its initially promised 2001 release date, likely due to the constant changes and additions requested by Universal and competing visions from both Check Six and Equinoxe.

The teams at Check Six and Equinoxe began the project on excellent terms, excited to begin work on such a popular franchise. Eventually, however, the team's management would distrust each other, obviously leading to even more difficulties in development. The two studios needed to be working closely together in order to have any chance of finishing the game on time. While Universal would mandate sweeping changes and revisions to the project very often, it would not grant the two teams the extra time or manpower needed to complete them. This rather stressful work environment would begin to take its toll on staff at the studios.

Far more work was necessitated than expected by Universal's mandates, and the future of the game began to look bleak. Not seeing a reasonable way to complete the project on time, many staff members of both studios began to leave. A now private YouTube documentary on the game's development would feature staff claims that this number of resignations grew ever higher when the remaining employees were forced into extended crunch periods and even worked unpaid shifts. Development became so arduous and the two studios so at odds that production was declared entirely dead at one point, with one staff member, Warren Davis, needing to mediate between the two company heads until they agreed to continue development.

Originally the game was planned to have over twenty-five levels and would feature the returns of Gnasty Gnorc and Ripto as teased at the end of Year of the Dragon. Under the circumstances, the team was unable to meet this original goal. The final game would feature just eight levels and one underwhelming boss fight against Ripto, Gnasty Gnorc being entirely cut from the game. The final boss battle can be accessed via a glitch seconds into starting a new game and has led to some rather notorious speedrunning records. The fact that the game was able to be released at all in a somewhat playable state was frankly a miracle.

The final game suffers from very noticeable frame rate issues, countless graphical and gameplay glitches and incredibly unappealing graphics. The team set out to produce a game with incredibly short loading times, but the final product can take over forty seconds to move between areas in the Playstation 2 version. Stewart Copeland, former drummer for The Police and composer of the iconic soundtrack of the original Spyro trilogy, would return to work on Enter the Dragonfly. This would be Copeland's last soundtrack for the series, recalling that he felt that he and Universal were "not on the same page anymore" after seeing marketing material for the game that he couldn't recognize as Spyro.

Enter the Dragonfly was a massive disappointment for everyone. Neither Check Six or Equinoxe would survive the game, shutting their doors shortly after the title's release in 2002. In 2019, a cheat code was discovered to access the game's secret credits. These credits contained the names' of countless employees who worked on the game but went entirely uncredited in the final release due to them, quite understandably, deciding to leave the project. Despite contributing to Enter the Dragonfly for an extended period of time before their departure, decisions were made somewhere to erase the evidence of their contributions. Perhaps this rather depressing fact best sums up Enter the Dragonfly's development - one of spite and conflict between developers and publishers.

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