To celebrate a year since the release of their indie break-out hit The Escapists, veteran games developer and international games label Team17 and solo indie dev Mouldy Toof Studios have announced that they will be releasing a brand new free map, Paris Central Pen, which will be available for all PC, Mac and Linux owners of The Escapists via a free Steam update on the 16th February.
The all new Paris Central Pen map is inspired by the La Santé Prison in Paris, which was once home to the infamous Carlos The Jackel and was hailed as one of France’s most notorious and brutal prisons.
The Escapists is the creation of former-roofer and the solo indie developer of Mouldy Toof Studios, Chris Davis. Team17’s CEO Debbie Bestwick, spotted the charming, 8bit, prison-escape game during its modest Kickstarter campaign and signed The Escapists to Team17’s games label on the 19th February 2014. It wasn’t just Team17 and the backers who saw the potential in the game, as The Escapists was greenlit by the Steam community within just 96 hours of its application and featured prominently within the Microsoft Xbox gamescom press conference.
Originally Davis had created the PC version of The Escapists in Multimedia Fusion, a program he got for free on the front cover of a PC magazine as a child. When he joined the Team17 label the studio’s own team recreated the game from scratch internally in Unity to allow Davis to bring his creation to a wider audience across Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4.
The Escapists entered Steam Early Access on the 20th August 2014 and then launched fully on PC and Xbox One on the 13th February 2015, with a PS4 version following in May and then an Xbox 360 version in December.
The Escapists reaches its first birthday milestone, over 1.25 million copies have been sold to date with the game being awarded a Mega Sales award from the ID@Xbox team.
The Escapists PC, Mac and Linux owners will be able to get the Paris Central Pen free map via a Steam update to their game on the 16th February, with the update following on Xbox One and PS4 at a later date.
