One of the most beloved characters in pop culture is Conan the Barbarian, originally created in 1932 by writer Robert E. Howard. While originating as a series of short stories and one novel, Conan has appeared in a variety of media forms over the years, including movies, comics books, TV shows and video games. Many have expressed a desire for a Conan game in the Soulslike genre, but it seems that will not be happening anytime soon. Marcos Cronander, President of Heroic Signatures ( the company that owns and manages the IP created by Robert. E Howard, revealed that multiple companies have pitched such a game, and it has always been rejected and the reason is Cronander feels the genre does not fit Conan.
“Conan’s world is low fantasy, and to me low fantasy means that if you were a normal person in the Hyborian Age, your life maybe wouldn’t look that different from some Mesopotamian farmer,” he said. “You’d just have a regular day. You wouldn’t be seeing elves and goblins. Maybe one friend claims he saw a werewolf in the forest.”
Conan trips over the uncanny constantly because he goes looking for it, and the stories work because the weird arrives on a gradient spanning bandits, ape-beasts, and a thing wreathed in shadow that the brain refuses to parse. “Make the magic feel special,” he tells partners. “So when you finally see the sorcerer, or the eldritch being, you go, ‘My God, this is crazy.’”
The same instinct makes him the rare executive who turns down the most popular pitch in the building. Studios float a Conan-skinned Dark Souls-like video constantly. He says no, and the reasoning comes straight from the controller. “Those games are about grinding you into the dust and making you feel insignificant. That’s not the Conan fantasy. You should feel like a badass.”
This is not to say Cronander is opposed to new Conan video games, he just feels it needs to be approached properly.
“A triple-A video game costs a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million dollars. Movies are the same. I would love if we just had two hundred million dollars laying around at the office.” Raising that money, attaching it to the right people, and pointing it at the right vision is the unglamorous center of the job, and he was candid about the learning curve: “People really underestimate (including myself) how hard it is to get these things made until I joined the company and saw it with my own eyes.”
Cronander does have an idea of what a Conan game should be like though, and the game he uses as reference point is Space Marine 2:
“When I was playing that game, I thought, this is what I want to feel when I play the Conan game.”
Hopefully this can happen one day