Dispatch feels like the kind of game that must have always been headed for success, having sold a million copies in just 10 days, and while it missed most of the awards season, it still landed on several best-of lists for the year. That impression hides a much rougher reality. Dispatch took years longer than expected, nearly collapsed more than once, and only made it out because the team managed to survive long enough to finish it.
“We’re taking GTA 6 amounts of time on this shit,” writer and co-founder Pierre Shorette says in an interview with Eurogamer, explaining why Dispatch Season 1 took so long to make. The episodic superhero workplace comedy spent close to seven years in development. The time spent wasn’t about endlessly refining a hit, but about dealing with lost funding, shifting plans, and simple survival. The upside is that the groundwork is now done, meaning a potential Season 2 would not need anything close to the same amount of time.
Game director Nick Herman is blunt about how close Dispatch came to ending. “We had a publisher who dropped us halfway through because of … financial things,” he says. Shorette places that moment in the context of the wider industry collapse.
“The industry was collapsing … We were right there,” he said, adding that without contract work paying the bills, “we would have died three years ago.” For years, the project mostly met rejection. “You have basically everyone tell you it’s a bad idea for seven f—ing years,” Shorette added, while Herman recalls being told, “This is dumb, don’t do it.”
Dispatch was also not always the game players recognize now. It began life as a live-action interactive TV project before COVID shut that version down. Early drafts were darker and more limited, focused on a single hero rather than a full team. Over time, the game evolved into a lighter and broader experience, shifting toward the dispatch system and the group of misfit superheroes that define it today. Even Robert, the main protagonist, wasn’t voiced by Aaron Paul–actor Rahul Kohli was in line to take the role. For his part, Kohli stars in Saros, which is scheduled to launch next April.
Now that Dispatch is out and doing well, the pressure has changed as Shorette compares it to a musician following up a debut album. “You have your whole life to write your first album and eight months to write your second.” But after taking an absurdly long time to launch one season, Dispatch is no longer starting from nothing–and that makes a much faster follow-up possible.
Dispatch is out now on PS5 and PC. It launches January 28 for Switch and Switch 2.