Trivia / Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

• Christmas Rushed: The game was rushed out as quickly as reasonably possible so that the half of Monolith's dev team working on it could be folded back in with the team working on Blood II: The Chosen to help finish that game. It didn't work out for either game, given that Shogo only came out two months before Blood II.
• Stillborn Franchise: Two expansion packs were planned, but sales plummeted after Half-Life came out and ate just about everyone's lunch.
• Troubled Production: In a postmortem on No One Lives Forever by lead designer Craig Hubbard, he began by reflecting on this game and revealed it to be a case of this. The game was meant to be much grander in scope and scale than what ultimately made it in, and the development team was simply too small to be able to accomplish their original vision, especially under the circumstances of pulling half of their team away to make a sequel to Blood entirely on the publisher's whims. Reportedly in his own words, "The final product is barely more than a prototype of what we were trying to make." The only thing that saved the game from being especially broken was when they changed their sights six months before the deadline to polish the game as it was rather than keep expanding it; this and seeing what made Half-Life so well-loved (in Hubbard's words, it didn't do a whole lot that was new, but what it did was done so well that the game is made up of unforgettable moments anyway) influenced their design priorities for NOLF, making a comparatively humble game and then polishing what they came up with to a mirror sheen, in turn making it and its sequel the highest-rated games they've ever released.
• What Could Have Been: Not only were there two expansion packs planned, the game was originally going to include a flashback to Sanjuro and company's childhood (you can see a few seconds of it in the opening movie), in which your interactions with the other characters would determine how your dialogue with them unfolded later in the game. Much more was planned too that never saw the light of day, which can be read in the aforementioned Troubled Production entry.

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