The story behind Wildlife, EA's unreleased multiplayer animal combat game

"This is one of the most fun things that we've made."

One of the few official screenshots of EA’s Wildlife: Forest Survival. Screenshot via GRY Online.

Back in late February, North Carolina-based video game designer Joe Bourrie posted a note on social media that referenced a Tweet I’d sent back in May 2012 while I was editor-in-chief of the gaming site Kotaku.

My post, he wrote, was “the saddest tweet of my career.” He punctuated his message with a colon and a parentheses. :(

This is what I’d written back in May 2012:

“OK, that EA animal combat game looked cool.”

I’d also linked to its trailer.

That EA animal combat was called Wildlife: Forest Survival and had been Bourrie’s game and my praise for it had come way too late.

“When you put that tweet out, it had already been canceled,” Bourrie recently told me. EA had quietly stopped development on Wildlife nearly a year prior.

By 2012, Wildlife’s developers had been moved to other projects at EA, but they still kept in touch about what could have been.

“I believe it was our creative director, Dustin Hansen, who actually sent it out to the team,” Bourrie said of my Tweet. “We all knew who you were, and it was just kind of like, ‘Oh, that hurts.’”

Wildlife was a game that pitted up to 12 players against each other as rabbits, foxes, hawks and alligators. The hawk could dive to attack. The alligator could snatch low-flying hawks out of the sky. The rabbit couldn’t defeat anyone but could collect carrots, and try not to die.

“It was the most creative leniency I've ever had in my career,” Bourrie wrote back in February. “Really just a game focused on being a unique experience without being beholden to the standard gaming tropes. Nearly 15 years later, it still might be the most fun game I've ever designed.”

Wildlife had begun as an experiment that, as Bourrie tells it, had EA employees from other floors of the company’s Salt Lake offices coming downstairs on lunch breaks just to play it. It had so much promise that Bourrie had begun planning how it could become more than a great game, but a great Electronic Arts franchise.

But things hadn’t panned out that way.

Wildlife began development in late 2009 and was cancelled by early 2011. It received just one trailer, one press release, was rated by the ESRB and then was gone.

Earlier this year, once I saw Bourrie’s Tweet about my Tweet, we got in touch.

He told me the whole story:

• How Wildlife came to be.

• How there’d actually been six animals initially planned, with a complex set of conflicting abilities.

• How there’d been some great buy-in from leaders at EA, until, for somewhat understandable reasons, one day there wasn’t.

And there was a big what-if for Bourrie: How could Wildlife: Forest Survival have fared, if its debut showcase hadn’t gone calamitously wrong?