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How the hell did The Saboteur get made (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-26 07:01:01
Imported:
2026-06

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At the end of 2009, EA published The Saboteur, an open-world action game starring a tough-talking dude with a knack for shooting bad guys. That doesn't sound so unusual.

But what if I told you this game, released mere weeks after the closure of its iconic studio, Pandemic, took place in occupied France during World War 2? And that you fought for the resistance, literally restoring color to a film noir, monochromatic metropolis? And you played as an Irish professional race car driver turned guerilla warfare one-man army?

That sounds a lot stranger!

This month, EA unexpectedly returned The Saboteur to Steam, where it can be downloaded right now. It's a perfect fit for the Steam Deck, and a fond reminder of what made this window of video games so strange.

In the back half, Frush and Plante construct a list of their favorite forgotten oddballs of the PS3/Xbox 360 Era.

The Saboteur's Steam Deck settings

The forgotten, oddball gems of the Xbox 360/PS3 Era

Dante’s Inferno

The SSX reboot

Shaun White Skateboard

Alice: Madness Returns

Driver San Francisco

Spore

Bulletstorm

Excite Truck and Excite Bots

Poll results

Who would win in a fight: Pac-Man or a pack of men?

Pac-Man - 57%

Pack of men - 43%

The winner is...

Toc-Man

We also recommend

The NYTimes book review of You Dreamed of Empires

Speaking of weird games of the Xbox 360-era, Humble Bundle is having a huge Earth Defense Force sale

Files

Comments

Roderick Dietrich

Maybe there was some confusion. I'm not sure exactly when the 'Racecar' scene takes place. But the location where it takes place, Saarbrücken, belonged to France from 1919 to 1935 and from 1947 to 1955. Unfortunately, the residents of the region voted twice for its annexation to Germany 😒

Andrew P

Appalled that Spore is considered forgotten but I guess it hit me at exactly the right time to be formative. Long after I tired of the (admittedly bad) gameplay, I used the spaceship designer to build series of freighters for several fictional shipping companies, as well as 2.5D art pieces (known in the tags as “spart”).

Kat

Dante's inferno the book is about Dante getting shown around Hell by his most best buddy Virgil. The roman poet. No wife stuff. That's the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

Sterling Haws

2009 was a weird time. Anyone remember Brütal Legend? Great game but man, that was a strange one.

Andrew Rogers

Thanks for the Saboteur spotlight! I absolutely love the Mercenaries games and miss Pandemic.

Leo Chaisson

I was pretty pumped to hear that saboteurs getting re-released. It's one of those games on the Xbox 360 that I had on my wish list and by the time I got around to it I could only find used copies and the one used copy I could find didn't work

David Bauer

I think El-Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron deserves a spot in the weird Xbox 360 era games discussion. Excited to hear The Saboteur is available for the Deck!

Ccchloister

I’d like to request an isolated, audio optimized download of Russ saying “Nipples!”. I also request a version in Chris’s Russterpretation, a rendition best described as “wildly offensive”. Thank you, gabagool.

Stephen J. Lunatic

Some of us remember Spore very well, being that it is the setting of quite possibly the best Monster Factory.

BucklingSwashes

As long as we're looking at 360/PS3-era games that suddenly just became available again, I would love to hear you guys devote a Resties episode to Alpha Protocol, which was just re-released on GOG. For a title that, let's face it, is EXTREMELY flawed, it did some really cool things with its roleplaying and storytelling systems that made your choices much more impactful than other similar choice-focused narratives. It's also still a very unique setting/concept for an RPG. I especially love how much passion the developers that worked on it still seem to have for it. I think it'd be interesting to hear more about how it was made, what went wrong, what went right, and its impact.

emjaybee_3

Since Russ and Chris seem to be pretty into Pandemic, it might be interesting to reach out to Matt Colville, who was the writer and a mission designer for the Mercenaries games and has since made a name for himself in the tabletop space in recent years.

Leo Chaisson

Just a heads up. I know the guys said Saboteur runs good on the Steamdeck, I tried playing with a gamepad(Xbox controller) on pc and ran into some pretty buggy controls with no way to fix them that I know. Particularly impossible to control driving and that's like the first thing you do so I couldn't play the game. I swear I'm cursed not to be able to play this game. Anyone know a fix for these controller issues? Edit: I was able to find some resources online to fix the worst gamepad issues, but not all of them

Devin White

This episode reminded me that I still have a Wii in my closet. I also picked up Red Steel 2 a long time ago but haven’t actually gotten around to play it. That game definitely qualifies for a “failed franchise” in my mind. I’ll need to try it out soon.

ThanaThots

The game ‘Too Human’ is the quintessential weird late 2000’s Xbox game to me. Decent sized budget, published by Microsoft, and just disappeared and forgotten after release.

Shart Carbuncle

That SSX reboot was fun, but it was right in that zone when everyone was seeing how far they could push their crappy monetization strategies, and it tried to sell you things like multiplier and xp booster consumables for each run. It sucked a lot of the joy out of it, because it felt like you were being penalized if you didn’t spend money; you could feel the progression being tuned down to incentivize spending. At least, that’s how I remember perceiving it at the time.

Hila SketchCat Shats

Spore was my FAVOURITE game growing up. As a science kid who played the sims 24/7 my dad knew exactly what I needed in my life. I could still boot and play it for hours. The space stage sucks though

Josh Andrews

I always loved Binary Domain from the 360 Era. 3rd person action shooter with a standard are androids human story, but loved the gameplay as it sported the full destructive capabilities of blowing up robots who would keep trying to fight you as limbs were blown off was just so fun. I also loved the arcade style of the old Def Jam Fight NY games. The late 2000s was just a wild time for games that might not be great but were just fun.

Sandy Archer

I feel like I need to step in a defend spore a bit. Not a good game but still the description was a bit off. It’s more of an evolution game. You can start as a custom space monkey but my understanding is that you are supposed to start as a micro organism and evolve up to an animal, tribes, then civilization then space fairing race. IMO the civilization and space were the worst bits which is what it sounds like the boys played. Starting as a custom blob that eats other blobs and things to get new prices to evolve and grow more was great. You can make some wild things, animal troops were okay, tribes were meh. But all those elements allowed you to build off the previous evolutions and work you did in the last phase. Plant eating microbe becomes herbivore becomes a more peaceful people. It was kinda neat. The fact that you could make it all look like dongs just made it better.

Ian Grossberg

Such a great throwback appreciation episode, thank you guys 😄 Pandemic reminds me of a short side story, we were a small NYC based R&D team for DICE who happened to be around right as they were being bought by EA. Work on BF2 was getting close to finished and we were let loose, created a suuuuper fun multiplayer-only cops vs robbers FPS + vehicles in a NY like city within the BF2 engine. Sweden were such fans they wanted us to move and build out the team and game, but we had family folks who couldn’t make the move and collectively declined (I was young enough to be excited by the idea not realizing how much longer winter in Stockholm is). EA started to wrangle more control over DICE and didn’t know what to do with us. They owned the license to develop the LOTR games and were burning to use it. They came to us and a few others asking how we felt developing an FPS LOTR game. Even with how much we were all such superfans of the books and movies (or maybe because we were) we knew couldn't think this idea would be anything but sh*t. This is where my direct knowledge ends but Sweden passed, a few other studios must have said no thanks, some how it ended up in the laps of the willing or forced Pandemic. Battlefront had done really well so why not! I wonder if anyone has here firsthand from the Pandemic side of LOTR Conquest! Also personally I think Shadows of Mordor has some really fun mechanics within the world, so it could be done!

Sweet Wizzle

Always love hearing you guys drag David Cage's ass. Very good list! Two games around the same level of obscurity that are getting remastered in the (hopefully) near future are Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, both by Grasshopper Manufacture. They were pretty janky even back then but I'm super looking forward to them! (Also wow, it was surreal to hear my comment discussed! Glad the list sparked curiosity!)

William (Biggggg5) Mason

I’ve grown to enjoy spore for what it is but Man that was my first time experiencing the “no man’s sky/cyberpunk 2077” phenomena of a game not delivering what I thought they said. I first heard about it when I first got game informer and I got two issues to start me off that I read over and over again. And there was a preview article about spore that to my young brain it felt like it described the coolest evolution simulator ever. It talked about selecting one of your creatures that was eating and commanding it to walk and by doing that it learned to Drag things and that it only compounded from there. The picture it painted was almost of the gameplay of Black and White where you teach the behavior of your little god avatar, but on the scale of a Species. But I the game was not out and my family computer was always out of date so it stayed in the back of my mind for Years. So when I did finally get my own computer years later, it had been so long the servers were already dead. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I still associate the name with the dream of what I thought that game was gonna be.

Dillon Broadwell

Another weird xbox/ps3 game is Medal of Honor Airborne. Being able to drop into the map at points where you really shouldn't had a fun cost benefit analysis you had to do (also pretty ahead of it's time looking back). It was pretty video game ass video game that I have a lot of found memories of that I am sure is not very fun to play right now.

James Johnson

The Saboteur is the game that I see every so often browsing Game Pass and think "I should really check that out someday." This episode sealed the deal, I think.

Noah

I’m very late to this but I think they accidentally combined SSX3 and the 2012 reboot together. SSX3 had the open mountain while SSX 2012 had you globe trotting across famous real mountains in more linear levels. Both were very fun and have great music, although personally I think SSX3 is far better overall

Sam Mosher

Loved this episode! Would love to hear y’all do episodes for the forgotten AAA gems of other game generations too!

B

@Plante: peanut butter and pickle sandwich hits every time. - Fellow PB&P lover