UPDATE: 2025-05-31 08:25 EST BY MOHAMED HASSAN
The archieve will not be sold
Jay Gunn has confirmed that the archive will bearchived and restoredrather than sold. He’s also still open to working with creative indie studios.
One of the most priceless archives of in video game design and art isnow up for sale, though it’s a bit due to unfortunate circumstances. Jay Gunn, the original visionary lead game designer for the classic PlayStation gameMedievil, has taken to Twitter to sell his entire lifetime archive of design work due to personal financial difficulties and an arduous job search process that has been more time-consuming than beneficial.
It would be a drastic understatement to call it just a design or development archive, as Gunn worked on pretty much everything that shaped the identity of the game as we know it: concept art, level design, co-writing, voice acting direction. The archive spans 4 books of concept art and environmental designs and maps and even lost level designs. It’s one of the most detailed archives out there, containing everything the creator worked on from the moment of his first pitch.
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In the images he shared, we can see abandoned color schemes for levels, concept ideas for other levels and color palettes, as well as his notes on how he made the creative decisions to remove or change those colors and other game design elements. Other material includes very detailed monster designs with notes on their quirks and movement schemes, feedback reviews, architectural designs, plot redesigns, and even dialog recording scripts from sessions with actors like the late Paul (Avon) Darrow (whose recordings were still used for the 2019 remake of Medievil).
According to Gunn, what was shared in his initial pitch on Twitter is just a tiny drop in the ocean of his personal, lifelong, handmade archive. Needless to say, the author’s eclectic mind and diverse experiences are on display in brushstroke and written word, but according to him, this somehow backfired with recruiters who tend to be confused by the eclecticism of his career, not to mention that interviews can take longer than two months to finalize. But the passion has not left him and he still wants to work in the industry.
Many fans expressed their support for Gunn and advised him to publish these things as a book, but unfortunately, the creator does not own the Medievil IP, andhe said that doing sowould get him into trouble with Sony’s legal department. We certainly hope that the passionate creator can find work without having to bid farewell to his own life’s work.
