Trivia / Haven: Call of the King

• Accidental Downer Ending: Ends with poor Haven having been outplanned by Vetch and Chess, who was on his side the whole time, and, with the king he had called to save the people dead at Vetch's hand, he is left to be chained to a rock forever while Vetch presumably conquers the whole galaxy. While a sequel would have seen him escape somehow, no sequel ever came, and there is very little interest in reviving the franchise.
• Colbert Bump: The game was relatively obscure thanks to its negative reception. Then, years later, the YouTube channel Nitro Rad reviewed the game, which led to the creation of this page. It saw another bump in 2020 when BIONICLE fans discovered that "Isle of Heroes" and "Sun Surfer Rising" (music tracks which had been reused in BIONICLE Heroes promotional media) had actually originated from this game.
• Creator Backlash: Downplayed with the game's lead designer, Jon Burton. In a video, he expressed dissatisfaction with the lead character's overall appearance, feeling that he should have looked different than he did in the final product. He also showed different, earlier designs for Haven, showing what he could have looked like. He looked like the Traveller's Tales' mascot.
• Follow the Leader: To most other major 3D platformers during the the sixth generation, but especially Jak and Daxter. Though to it's credit, the game did make an effort to differentiate itself through the abundant gameplay mechanics.
• Stillborn Franchise: Haven was being hyped up to be the next big action-adventure video game franchise and ended with a cliffhanger, in hopes of building up interest in completing the trilogy. It didn't take.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The cat-like mascot on the Traveller's Tales logo of the time was supposed to be the protagonist of this game. However, due to Executive Meddling from Activision, who were originally the game's publisher during development before Midway Games came in and took their place, Traveller's Tales were forced to change the design of the character to look more human (possibly to distance the comparisons to Ratchet & Clank). Jon Burton, the lead designer of the game, wasn't happy about this.
  • It's also implied in this video that the game was originally going to have a non-linear, open-world design, as opposed to the rather linear design in the final product.
  • As already mentioned on the main page, Haven: Call of the King was supposed to be part of a trilogy and it was going to be ported over to the Xbox, Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance. Though all of that was cancelled due to the game flopping.

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