“We were going in a lot of direction at once,” O’Connor recalls.

Chris Ulm, Darkwatch’s design director and co-writer, estimates that, at its peak, Sammy grew to around 200 employees. “We hired in a hurry, and we got big.” The 30,000 square foot custom facility could accommodate development on multiple games and included a publishing arm that would localize Japanese games and seek out original titles in Europe and North America to publish under Sammy Studios. “Sammy was a big swing,” O’Connor explains. With Sammy Studios, the company was hoping to break into the western market in a big way. Sammy Corporation previously had some success developing arcade games like Viewpoint and Survival Arts in the 1980s, but had largely abandoned game development to focus on its highly profitable pachinko machines. In 2002, the Japanese company Sammy Corporation hired Midway’s former vice chairman, John Rowe, to lead a brand new development studio in Carlsbad, California. “We know it wasn’t perfect,” O’Connor says, “but we also think that we were onto something, and it’s a crying shame that it didn’t become a franchise.” Despite a positive critical reaction to Darkwatch and an enthusiastic fan base, Darkwatch 2 became a casualty of conflicting business directions, and the series never became what its creators hoped it could be. Between the development of Darkwatch and its ill-fated sequel, ownership of the studio changed hands five times before eventually becoming a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, where it remains to this day.

O’Connor, along with Chris Ulm, Farzad Varahramyan, and Emmanuel Valdez, brought Darkwatch to life amidst years of organizational changes and economic uncertainty. O’Connor is one of the four co-creators of Darkwatch and a founding member of both Sammy Studios and the company it would eventually become: High Moon Studios. “That was our company, that was our game, that was our shot.”

“I miss Darkwatch every day of my life,” Darkwatch lead designer Paul O’Connor tells me. It’s been 15 years since the release of Darkwatch, but creators of the game have never stopped dreaming about what the universe could have become.

Darkwatch 2 saddle ride