There were a good few years back in the day when other developers believed they could compete with Grand Theft Auto. Games like the original Saints Row and The Getaway aped its ideas but could never match the inspiration (Saints Row instead opting to go in its own glorious direction), and eventually most just learned to leave it to Rockstar.

But what about if you took the same inspiration, plucked out just a couple of features to focus on, and lowered the scale to something possible for a smaller team? That’s the idea behind Samson, a driving and hand-to-hand combat game from one of the main minds behind the Just Cause series.

Christofer Sundberg was one of the original founders of Avalanche, the Swedish studio behind the massive Just Cause franchise and 2015’s Mad Max. In 2020, Sundberg left the now enormous Avalanche to start over, creating a AA studio called Liquid Swords, with the mission statement to be a “no-nonsense games developer,” eschewing “pointless meetings,” all crunch, and “unnecessary stakeholders.” The result of the last six years of trying to make games differently is Samson, a game about both driving and fighting in which a man desperately attempts to escape crippling debt.

At the start of Samson, the titular protagonist returns from jail to his hometown of Tyndalston, a grim city of dark, crime-filled streets and punishing gangs. It’s this very nature that gives Samson hope, that he can exploit the area to raise enough money to manage his debts, which grow literally by the hour. Every day is about picking from a selection of paying missions to raise funds--usually involving dangerous driving or fisticuffs--desperately trying to keep on top of his repayments. It’s almost as if it’s a metaphor for something.

“The way we’ve been making games for over 15 years is simply not sustainable,” Christofer Sundberg tells us. “Game development must be focused, optimized, efficient, and most importantly, fun. It may sound simple, but we are…making entertainment, and games should be fun to create. That’s what I strongly believe in.”

But can the philosophy meet reality? (“Not many, or none,” Sundberg assures when I ask if they really managed to avoid any pointless meetings for six years.) How did this approach lead to Samson? “Just like I built Avalanche around Just Cause in the early days, I built Liquid Swords around Samson,” says the developer. A core lesson learned from time at Avalanche was “always stay on course,” and that was applied at the new, smaller studio. While the game obviously went through iterations, Sundberg says it was always focused on the game’s “core pillars,” although he added, “Samson’s original concept was [very] different than it is today--we’ll share that at some point and it’ll blow your mind.”

Why the change? “As Creative Director, you always think you have the best ideas. Then you quickly realize that game development is always a group effort, and when you build a team of incredibly talented people, you have to re-evaluate your own ideas.”

The result of this is a game that begins with its story focused on Samson’s debt but expands to encompass the changing nature of a seemingly lost Tyndalston. The more missions you successfully complete, the more XP you gain to unlock improved skills, both driving and on foot, better able to take on the increasingly tough challenges put in front of you.

“The game is really open to be experimented with,” says Sundberg, explaining how its systems can be manipulated as the player sees fit. Fail to keep up your debt payments and you’ll encounter brutal collectors on your travels, but Sundberg discovered, “I’ve found the debt collectors to be a good source of money, so I can deliberately not pay off the debt on a daily basis…The debt collectors will show up and they are rich, so [I] beat them up and take their money. You can go for the more low-risk jobs the rest of the day.”

Of course, no matter the smaller scale or ambitions, it’s inevitable that people are going to draw comparisons between Samson, created by a team of 40, and Grand Theft Auto from a team of over 1,000 with seemingly infinite money. But Sundberg is optimistic about that. “When a new GTA game is released, it’s Christmas for everyone. It drives the industry forward, and there will always be a place for games alongside GTA. Samson really fills that space. Many hardcore GTA fans (including myself) will like the gritty setting, the brutal [nature of] Tyndalston, and how Samson represents a darker world. GTA is moving into something more colorful, lighthearted, and not as depressing as Tyndalston.”

Samson is now available on the Epic Games Store.