Mad Catz, the company behind a wealth of third-party peripherals and most of the Rock Band gear still circulating, has filed for bankruptcy and is closing down. The company, which began in 1989, filed for bankruptcy under chapter 7, initiating a liquidation of their assets.

Mad Catz served as the co-publisher for Rock Band 4 in addition to creating the instruments, promoting the game, and distributing the game around the world. The game did not come anywhere close to meeting sales expectations, resulting in unrecoverable harm to both Mad Catz and Harmonix. Harmonix just recently laid off 17 employees, marking the fourth time in five years that the development studio had to cut back staff.

This unfortunate end for Mad Catz comes a bit over a year after the company had to lay off about 37% of its staff due to the poor sales performance of Rock Band 4. You may remember Mad Catz for their work on any number of colorful, translucent controllers over the years. Chances are, if you went to a friend's house to play console games, you were probably handed a Mad Catz controller.

We wish the best of luck to everyone affected by this closure.