Trivia / Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

• Acting for Two: Gregg Berger voices Ripto once again, and now voices his two minions Crush and Gulp, both of whom only speak with the former.
• Christmas Rushed: Numerous reworks led to a product that was never close to a finished state. But with what was on the table in its final months of development (and still no closer to a complete product), Universal Interactive forced the three developers to finish the game for a Winter 2002 release.
• Creator's Apathy: Happened as the project reached closer to its eventual release date; with so much being demanded out of the development team, they flat out said they were finished trying to make anything worthwhile and just focused on fixing what they had made by that point.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Nearly everyone who worked on this game would like to forget about it, due to its Troubled Production and the excessive amount of drama and friction going on between all three companies involved (Universal, Equinox, and Check Six). This general distaste extends to the final quality of the eventual product as well. As stated in the documentary, several former employees were so traumatized by the experience that they outright refused to be interviewed for it.
  • This marked the end of Stewart Copeland's involvement in the franchise for well over a decade, as after seeing one of the first ads Universal made, he felt he was completely at odds with the studio.
• Creator Killer: Enter the Dragonfly has the dubious honor of being the first and last game developed by Check Six Studios and Equinoxe Digital Entertainment. The next console title (and the last before the Legend Continuity Reboot) would be developed by Eurocom instead.
• Disowned Adaptation: Ted Price, president of Insomniac Games, did not mince words in saying Enter the Dragonfly was a terrible game and an embarrassing follow-up to the original Spyro games they created.
  "Spyro has become an abused stepchild. While Digital Eclipse did a great job on the GBA titles, Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly on PS2 and GameCube was an absolute travesty. When it was released, I was polite about it when people asked, having not played the game. But then I played it. It seems to me at this point that consumers are going to think twice before they buy another Spyro game? What's worse for us at Insomniac is that a lot of people assume we made Enter the Dragonfly."
• Dummied Out:
  • Among the game's cut content is a level called "Enchanted Forest" that got decently far in development and appeared in early screenshots; remains of its data such as its music track still exist in the game.
  • Cut voice lines from Sparx allow speculation that there were many features that got this treatment: three Ripto fights - with associated seals, each requiring more dragonflies - may have been originally planned, in addition to lines concerning a challenge of an energy field similar to a set of pillars, challenges that necessitated Bubble Breath implying it would be a later Rune, lines about challenges for Invincibility, Supercharge, and Superflame, and a line about a suspicious patch of grass, among a medley of tutorial lines, completion announcements, miscellaneous lines, some possible NPC requests, and the 100% message concerning the Dragon Elders.
• Executive Meddling: The game's development cycle can best be summed up as "Spyro: Fledgling Developers vs. Universal Executives". During development, the Universal Interactive producer of the project would often force in his own take on what should and what shouldn't be in the game without consulting with the rest of the development team. This caused their work environment to be in a state of toxicity between each member(s) that was never resolved by the publisher. The biggest bone of contention was that the devs wanted more open and less linear levels, whereas Universal wanted to stick with the more traditional and linear gameplay of the Insomniac trilogy, though ironically the more open direction that Check Six wanted would appear in the next game, A Hero's Tail. It was a case of History Repeats, as a year earlier, another big Playstation mascot franchise also had its fourth mainline title helmed by a completely different development team from the original trilogy; they too wanted to take the franchise in a new direction with more open-ended and less linear levels, only to be forced to make the gameplay more traditional and in-line with the original games, only for the next game to have the open-ended levels the dev-team wanted on the previous game.
• Feelies: Early copies of the game included a seven-track music CD, which had a few tracks that weren't used in the final version of the game.
• Hostility on the Set: During the game's troubled production hostility between employees was rampant, with one major case going to a worker who would snap on a whim and spent a lot of time in confrontations, even escalating to the point of violence on numerous occasions. Other employees would get in arguments often and this in turn led to a very toxic environment that was difficult to stay productive in.
• Role Reprise: This is the only Spyro game to retain all of the characters' voice actors from the previous game.
• Schedule Slip: Owing to the heavy amount of Executive Meddling, the game ended up in a much longer than anticipated two-and-a-half year development cycle, beginning in March 2000 and not releasing until November 2002.
• Troubled Production: And how. One fan put together a two-hour long documentary featuring interviews with people who worked on the game, compiling employees attacking each other, stubborn publishers, egotistical developers, and other behind-the-scenes trouble. A few particularly noteworthy cases:
  • As stated in Executive Meddling, Universal frequently would demand things and change their demands on a whim, outright asking for unrealistic goals. This game was helmed by a completely different development team from the original trilogy who wanted to try something new, but Universal kept insisting it "wasn't Spyro enough" and wanted a game more in the vein of the Insomniac titles, which frequently meant a lot of hours were wasted working on things that wouldn't be in the final product.
  • Hostility between employees was rampant, with one major case going to a worker who would snap on a whim and spent a lot of time in confrontations, even escalating to the point of violence on numerous occasions. Other employees would get in arguments often and this in turn led to a very toxic environment that was very difficult to stay productive in.
  • As Check Six was still a start-up company, and with the constant revisions of what was demanded, employees frequently had to work long hours at no extra pay, with one worker spending two nights in a row at the office. In addition, several paychecks were missed, with the missing pay still unresolved to this day.
• What Could Have Been: Shares a Page.