The untimely demise and belated resurrection of the notorious Captain Blood
Preservation is top of mind for many developers and professionals in the games industry nowadays. In the wake of the abrupt sunsetting of Concord last September and the news this past March that Sony has begun backing up its PS5 game builds as part of its larger ongoing preservation efforts, the simultaneous ephemerality and invaluable cultural legacy of video games has seldom been felt more than it is now.
But what about the games that, despite the hours and months and years of hard work poured into them, never saw the light of day? Captain Blood is one such game that, through the considerable efforts of a small publisher led by a intrepid pair of GOG veterans, will finally see safe harbor next week after over a decade of being lost at sea.
Last year, publisher SNEG launched a Steam page for Captain Blood, a pirate-themed action game based on the adventure novel series of Rafael Sabatini. Originally developed by Akella in the early 2000s and planned for release on the seventh generation of consoles, the developer’s well-laid plans were inadvertently scuttled by the sudden bankruptcy of Playlogic, the game’s publisher at the time, a mere three months before the game’s intended release date in 2010. The near-complete build of Captain Blood lay dormant on a server until, nearly a decade later, it was leaked online and made the rounds via numerous torrent sites.
“As sometimes that happens, most likely there was a kind of controlled leak by someone who was close to development, who wanted this game to be checked by gamers,” SNEG co-founder Oleg Klapovskiy told Polygon over Zoom. “It was actually an indicator for us that, Hey, not everything is lost, and it was an extra push for us to finally check who actually owns the rights.” Shortly after negotiating with the then-rights holder, SNEG set to work assembling the original team of developers to advise on the process of remastering and releasing the game to the public.
The story between Captain Blood’s development and SNEG goes deeper and farther back than 2024, however, with Klapovskiy and SNEG co-founder Artem Shchuiko having been involved in the publishing and distribution side of the game during its initial development. Klapovskiy’s history in the games industry runs deep; he got his start as an early member of the international esports organization Virtus.pro before eventually spending over a decade at CD Projekt, working on the business development and operations side of GOG. Prior to CD Projekt, Klapovskiy worked a stint at Akella, the developer of the 2003 Pirates of the Caribbean game, whose proprietary “Storm 2” engine was retrofitted to develop Captain Blood.
“The original elevator pitch was that this team, Akella, had just released the Pirates of the Caribbean game published by Bethesda,” Klapovskiy says. The positive critical and commercial reception to that game spurred the team to consider immediate possible projects. “We were like, Hey, we have a nice engine. We finally know how to develop games for consoles. What is most popular on consoles nowadays? Action genre, fighting; God of War is there, Devil May Cry is there. Let’s do something in the pirate setting on our current engine because it’s cool. So that was the internal pitch: a God of War-like game in a pirate setting.”
At the time, Shchuiko was working at 1C-SoftClub, a Russian publisher that was interested in distributing Captain Blood. “I was looking at the same project from the publisher’s point of view,” Shchuiko told Polygon. “Not necessarily in charge of it, but I was attached to the process.” It was not until years later, though, in the wake of Captain Blood’s sudden cancellation, that he and Klapovskiy would actually meet at GOG. “I was doing some business development work for indie developers, and one of my jobs was to bring an installment of a game series into the storefront called GOG,” Shchuiko says. “And that’s how I met Oleg. We actually signed a deal, we negotiated it, and after that I got a job offer at GOG.”
After working together for seven years, Klapovskiy and Shchuiko founded SNEG together in 2020, with a specific focus on “reviving classic games from the digital abyss and legal hell.” For both, publishing Captain Blood and bringing the game to storefronts isn’t just a professional opportunity, but a full-circle moment and a chance to rectify an error of circumstances. “There are many people that worked on the game, and some of them work in big companies right now,” Klapovskiy says. “But they were always frustrated that the game never came out, because they put years of their work in it and years and years working almost for free, actually.”
Since obtaining the rights to publish Captain Blood, the original team members at Akella, then referred to as the “SeaWolf” team, have been instrumental in bringing the game to modern storefronts. “We were having a laugh with the project lead of the game, who’s actually senior technical director at Roblox for many years,” Klapovskiy said. “They’re really cheering for the project. Some of them would love to fully rework it, some of them want the project to be released as is, but the most important thing is that they want [it] to be released. That’s crucial. The guys are great, I was sitting with them in the same office for many years. Some are working at Roblox, and some of the artists were working on the Mortal Shell game on the graphical side.”
While the former members of SeaWolf team consulted on Captain Blood’s release, it was the Singapore- and Malaysia-based porting house General Arcade that went about the task of bringing the game in line with modern hardware. “General Arcade is our long-standing partner who we’ve worked with on bigger mastering projects,” Shchuiko told Polygon. “There is a certain issue when it comes to releasing classic games, especially those that need a full-blown remaster or upscale or improvements of the technical aspect of the game. Because whenever you come to any majority of the porting houses on the market, you ask them, Can you do this for remaster? and they’re like, Sure. Unity or Unreal? and you tell them, Well, we have a custom engine. And so usually what happens is the price goes double because it’s just an unknown and very complicated thing. But with General Arcade, they’re like, Yeah, custom engine! More problems! Interesting, tell us more! So they’re really driven by the challenge; you can see a spark in their eyes.”
Bringing a 2010-era game up to 2020-era standards meant introducing a suite of quality-of-life improvements, including everything from controls and visual fidelity to in-game guide markers and smoother cutscene animations. Despite these improvements, however, Klapovskiy has said that the goal has always been to realize the game as it was originally intended. “There are many things that we could change to ensure that the game is better received by the modern generation of gamers,” Klapovskiy said. “But at the same time, we are not original creators and we want to ensure that this is actually the piece of art created by the original team, and I think that if the game will get lower scores because of that, we’ll accept it. We just want to bring an experience that was supposed to be released over 10 years ago, and we understand that everyone might not like it, especially modern gamers, but we want to stick to what was supposed to be.”
Ultimately, Klapovskiy and Shchuiko want to do Captain Blood justice and allow the original developers to close this long-unresolved chapter of their careers. “There are many stories like this, but not even one comes to my mind that actually the game was finally released years after,” Klapovskiy ruminated. “I think that’s the first case like this, and I feel super great for the original dev team that finally they will be able to put these credits on their CVs at least, because it’s not like we worked on this project that nobody saw and spent five-plus years on it. No, this is the game that was released, and I think this is the thing that I’ll be trying to push, because really I think we need to remember about creators.”
“Releasing Captain Blood makes you think about all of the games which were unjustly put on hold by whatever circumstances,” Shchuiko said. “Sometimes, people start working on the game and then realize it doesn’t work as a concept and choose to put it on hold, not continuing development. But we all know that there are multiple stories where the games were in a good shape going towards a beautiful release and something happened. A lot of this talent and effort just sits on some system’s server, if it sits on any server, and it never comes to light. And I think this is something we as an industry can just put an eye on and see if maybe we can do something.”
Captain Blood will be released May 6 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.