Dispatch Took "GTA 6 Amounts of Time" To Make, But Season 2 May Not Take Nearly As Long

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.