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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 02/11/2024

Animated GIFs don't work on Bluesky? Some of the pictures in my thread were supposed to be moving... 😢

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Now, you can re-read this whole thread and replace "Musketeer" with "Zorro" - it works too :D

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Moreover, new generation of artists are rediscovering the works of Alexandre Dumas. Check out the Dumariolles collective's amazing work! Maybe one day, some company will finally take a chance to make a proper musketeers video game adaptation. Let's just hope they'll get it right! 24/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

But who knows what the future holds? There are still movies and TV series being made about the Musketeers, and some video games in adjacent settings (En Garde!, Greedfall, Assassin's Creed Unity...). 'Sacre Bleu' is a promising indie comedy platformer coming soon! 23/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Since video games tend to stick to mainstream, we do get some great pirate games! Basically, captain Jack Sparrow killed any chance for d'Artagnan and the boys to star in their own video game. 22/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Pirate films had always been, initially, a sub-genre of swashbuckler. But in the 2000's, swashbuckling became synonym with pirates. Pirates became the dominant genre, and in the process, overshadowed all the other old-fashioned fencers in tights. 21/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

According to its authors, The Curse of the Black Pearl was designed from the ground-up as a revival of the classic Swashbuckler formula, with added grittiness and fantastical elements thrown in. It was a mega-hit, and made pirate stories mainstream again. 20/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

In the early 2000's, and despite Antonio Banderas' best efforts as Zorro, classic Swashbuckler films had fallen out of fashion. This was until... 2003, when Pirates of the Caribbean came out! Remember how kids described En Garde! as a "pirate game"? 19/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Why none of these games ever gets made? Well, my explanation is that popular video games tend to inspire from mainstream settings. Medieval fantasy, sci-fi, zombies, you name it. And unfortunately for me, musketeers haven't been mainstream for... a while. 18/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

I've heard about several devs and studios having ideas for a musketeer game, here and there. In a blog post for Playstation, Brian Fleming from Suckerpunch told they considered musketeers as their next game setting, before going for feudal Japan with Ghost of Tsushima. 17/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

So, there's still no proper musketeer game then. En Garde! isn't one. Why isn't anyone else doing it? I've been wondering for years. Apart from a bunch of obscure abandonware, it's still an unexplored setting. 16/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

En Garde! was made as a melting pot of references. Older generations will "get" the nostalgic swashbuckler feel. Some younger players have described it as a pirate game - which is fine too! It also came out right during the Puss in Boots hype 🐱 (Art by @casynuf.bsky.social) 15/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Initially, I barely knew about all this, I only had some clichés in mind - sword fights, feathered hats, swinging chandeliers... But that's what works so well about En Garde!' concept. You don't need to know. The swashbuckler tropes are rooted in popular imagination. 14/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

We loved the hispanic flair, and the Golden Age Spain setting also felt more original to us than doing French Musketeers - which is ironic, considering my initial thought on the lack of Musketeer video games. 13/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

With En Garde!, we wanted to pay homage to the swashbuckler genre as a whole. We chose to set the game in 17th century Spain, because the genre initially came from here ("comedia de capa y espada" were theater plays from that period). 12/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

I also realized some of my favorite video games could arguably qualify as "swashbuckling" experiences - Uncharted (as described by @amyhennig.bsky.social herself), Assassin's Creed Black Flag... But none of them actually recreated the "classic" definition of swashbuckler. 11/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Several Disney/Dreamworks films draw from swashbuckler tropes too. En Garde! owes a lot of its light-hearted tone and comedy to it. Aladdin checks most of the boxes. Flynn Rider from Tangled is a typical swashbuckler protagonist, and an hommage to actor Errol Flynn. 10/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Then, the tropes and "vibes" of the genre expanded and evolved into other things. Indiana Jones was described as a swashbuckler by Lucas and Spielberg. Guardians of the Galaxy is swashbuckling in space. 9/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

During Hollywood golden age, Swashbucklers shared the spotlight with Westerns. The Three Musketeers alone has more than 50 film and TV adaptations listed on Wikipedia. 8/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

In classic literature and cinema, swashbuckler was big. The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Zorro, The Princess Bride, basically every pirate story, and many others, nowadays forgotten. 7/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

The french term (de cape et d'épée) interestingly morphed into "cloak and dagger" in english. Cloak and dagger stories are more about espionage, which is also sometimes a component of Swashbuckler. 6/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

It's also a very french genre. We call it de cape et d'épée - "of cape and sword". We have our own classics. In french, the name implies less "pirate adventures" and more "dueling noblemen". It's also seen as old school, even more so than in english. 5/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Swashbuckler was a subgenre of historical fiction, with adventure, romance and intrigue galore, featuring sword fights between charming scoundrels, damsels in distress and mustache-twirling villains. Basically all of my favorite things in the world! 4/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

What caused that shift of focus for En Garde? Well, when I was doing research for the game's concept, I quickly stopped looking at Alexandre Dumas' musketeers only, as I digged into the rich legacy of the Swashbuckler genre. 3/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

In 2024, there STILL isn't any musketeer game. Because En Garde! is not a proper "musketeer" game in the end. It doesn't star a crew of french braggart noblemen. We set the action in Spain, and our protagonist is a vigilante, closer to Zorro than to d'Artagnan. 2/24

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

"Why isn't there any musketeer video game?" 🤺 In 2017, as a game design student, I pitched a game inspired by The Three Musketeers. This game turned into En Garde!, which we released in 2023 ✨ Despite that, I'm still asking that same question to this day. Thread 🧵

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 04/11/2023

My game is endorsed by Nathan Drake himself 🤠🥺

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Adrien Poncet ⚔️ Game Director @ledrien.bsky.social · 03/11/2023

I might start posting some threads about En Garde!'s development soon

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