The Making of Grabbed by the Ghoulies – Celebrating 15 Years with Xbox Feature

On September 24th, 2002, Microsoft revealed that Rare was now part of Team Xbox. The studio used that moment to showcase two games – Kameo: Elements of Power and Perfect Dark 2. Yet neither would come out first. That honour fell to 2003’s Grabbed by the Ghoulies, which proudly continued Rare’s tradition of daft game titles.
However, as 28-year Rare veteran and current creative director Gregg Mayles explains, Ghoulies had a little Nintendo heritage to it.
“That was a Gamecube game, really. It was designed for a Nintendo machine and you can see that with the look and feel of it. But the transition from GameCube to Xbox was so late in development that we didn’t really have time to adapt it to an Xbox audience.”
As a result, there were plenty of changes that Mayles would have made given more time.
“I would have certainly aged it up a bit,” he muses. “The gameplay I felt was sound. If I had another six months I would have changed the tone – perhaps make it a Teen-rated game rather than an E-rated one. I wouldn’t have gone Resident Evil with it, but it was very Scooby Doo. I would have gone somewhere in-between. It would have been slightly grittier. And that would have pushed the humour and the fighting in a slightly different way.”
The Ghoulies team devised the game’s name before conceiving what the project would actually be about. The final idea to build a brawler came from Rare’s roots making arcade games many years before. Having seen the arcade beat ’em-up grow increasingly serious, Mayles and his colleagues felt there was a market for a brawling game a little more suited to console audiences.
“When we did arcade stuff in the old days, we had this idea for a multiplayer brawler, but it never really suited the arcades,” Mayles recalls, “When the console came along, I found the idea of one character fighting many really intriguing. That got channelled into Ghoulies, where the idea was to have you surrounded by enemies, almost like a bad martial arts film where the hero stands in the middle and each of the bad guys take their turn to try their luck.”
Ghoulies receieved mixed reviews at the time, but has now found a new audience via Rare Replay for Xbox One.
“I often joke about how poorly received that game was,” Mayles admits. “The sales were not what we wanted, but it’s almost been given a second life with Rare Replay, and now it is backwards compatible on Xbox One.”