38 Studios Retrospective

It’s now been a decade since 38 Studios, the team behind Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, declared bankruptcy and shut down. And to commemorate this anniversary, GamesIndustry.biz brings us this article that primarily acts as a hit piece shoveling pretty much all the blame for the shutdown onto the studio’s founder – Curt Schilling.

Here’s a quick excerpt to give you an idea of what to expect:

When one former employee said Schilling couldn’t imagine a scenario where the game failed, the former pitcher more or less agreed.

“That’s the way I’m built. I think it’s one of the reasons I was able to do what I did playing baseball. And it’s not fake. I’ve been around situations where you can make people believe something they don’t believe… We never had that sense of urgency or panic. I think there was a sense of invulnerability — I don’t want to say invulnerability, but I think we were comfortable.”

Comfortable. 38 Studios had been so strapped for months that it wasn’t even paying for employees’ health insurance, and Schilling was comfortable. The company had been recruiting developers and asking them to uproot their families and move them to the development notbed of Rhode Island even as the financial picture was so desperate that it wouldn’t even pay for the movers like it agreed to, but Schilling felt comfortable. He was about to leave hundreds of employees in the lurch, some of them stuck with two mortgages and no income, and he felt comfortable.