You are reading material prepared during the development of the pirate life simulation game Corsairs Legacy by Ukrainian Mauris studio with the aim of popularizing the marine theme in general and pirate games in particular. You can follow the project news on our website, YouTube channel, and Telegram.

Sea Dogs: To Each His Own was released on December 7, 2012. BlackMark Studio is still working on this project today. More precisely, over the “Legendary Edition.” User ratings have changed a lot throughout the life cycle of the project, but now statistics on Steam tell us about 73% of positive reviews.

On March 18, 2021, we interviewed Mikhail, a developer at BlackMark Studio, where we asked a series of questions about the Sea Dogs: To Each His Own game. In particular, we were interested in the history of the development of the project.

“The story is quite old. This was around April 2008. It all started with the corsair-themed forum seaward.ru, where I met a girl, Ira. At first, she and I wrote it off just for the game, and then, after the release of the Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships, Akella offered scripts to amateur teams to do something interesting, Ira and I decided to try to cooperate and applied together. From that moment, our studio was born.”

Mikhail notes that he is not aware of the exact number of teams, but emphasizes that there were a lot of them. In addition to BlackMark Studio, the scripts received two more commands. Of all the projects, only one has reached release.

“It was like this: we worked, released various patches, and gradually prepared to make the game. Then we made a design document and in the summer of 2010, we sent it to Akella. And we received a response in which they showed their interest and invited us to negotiations. There we agreed on certain things, I returned and registered the organization.”

BlackMark originally planned to create two main characters, but Akella recommended starting with one.

Let's mention that there was no talk about Steam at that time - the idea to arrange a release in it appeared in 2012, six months before the release of the game.

In 2009-2010, Eduard Zaitsev also joined the work of BlackMark Studio, making his contribution. Here is what Mikhail says about it:

“Whether he worked with Akella then or not, I didn’t know, maybe he was asked to help. At that time he was still working on the Sea Dogs 4, maybe Akella sent him to us. He just helped us and many thanks to him for that.”

Akella did not pay BlackMark for the development of Sea Dogs: To Each His Own. According to the agreement, they had to compensate for the costs with royalties after the release of the product. So, we can say that BlackMark Studio created their project solely for the sake of the idea.

Was Sea Dogs: To Each His Own successful?

“Probably not much. In fact, more of moral satisfaction. I can’t tell you the numbers, but you can’t live on them, especially if you divide by 7 people. At the moment, it cannot be turned into a job.”

We hope you found this article useful!

Learn more about the Corsairs Legacy - Historical Pirate RPG Simulator project and add it to your wishlist on the game's Steam page.