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Midway Newcastle Final Days Explained
In mid July Midway Newcastle was closed after Warner Brothers failed to purchase the studio as part of its Midway buyout. After the closure not much has been heard out of the former employees or any news about the new game that was in development Necessary Force. Steven Pick a former artist at the studio tells all on his website. Check it out:
You can read the rest of Steven's story at his official website here.
I've been meaning to write this blog post for two weeks now.... I guess it wasn't the most instantaenous thing in the world to suddenly convert all my feelings into a convenient block of text. Here I am, two weeks on and sitting in my flat; unemployed and waiting for stuff to happen. Good stuff to happen. I mean, seriously good stuff. I'm quite excited by it all, but I think I'm probably not the only one playing the waiting game after the fallout of our studio's closure. There's people waiting for dole, people waiting for interviews, people waiting for job confirmations, e-mails, phone calls. It reaffirms the notion that this big floaty rock is one big waiting room. Waiting for what? I could go all profound, but meh. It's too early.
Ever since the Chapter 11 bankruptcy announcement for Midway as a company, we've been erring on the side of caution. Anything could happen, right? The company was still operating as normal, but the Chapter 11 thing was like a silent dread-spectre hovering over all of us. The cause of this was through some allegedly shady dealings between Sumner Redstone and a bloke called Mark Thomas. No one knew who he was, and he tried to reassure everyone that it was all fine. Alarm bells rang though; it seemed quite, quite dubious. All of a sudden, the company was sold to him for a paltry $100,000 and then a magical legal process ensued where all deadlines for debts accelerated their deadlines for payment. Midway didn't have the funds at the time to pay them, and thus Chapter 11 became part of our legal vocabulary. It was all fine though - we'd still be operational; at that point, we were working on finishing up with Wheelman. The great thing about that was that I (and others) were putting in a lot of latenighters to get the job done, so we were practically too busy to worry about Chapter 11. We just got on with it.
The Ubisoft deal was pretty flawless in its execution, and a necessity to get the game out and marketed to its fullest potential. Some saw this as a sign of weakness on Midway's part, but it turned out to be quite a sweet deal. It gave the company more breathing space and we were happy to see a shiny Ubisoft trailer up on Gametrailers getting some good feedback. Perversely, some people considered the game to be better once Ubisoft was involved, rather than Midway. The company name was unfortunately synonymous with disappointment, cheap and tacky... was it deserved? I'm not sure... it wasn't as if any of us in the studio were skimping on our workloads. We were passionate about what we did, and we all enjoyed playing videogames. I know, it's a cliche, but it's one which runs throughout the industry; people who work on videogames will more likely or not love playing videogames too.
I don't want to think that the Midway taint somehow carried through to the erratic review scores which Wheelman received. Although we saw many, many nuggets of positivity on gaming forums, the journalistic view was distinctly Marmite - they either totally "got" it and enjoyed it, or hated it. People were perhaps expecting a bit too much from the "GTA4 Meets Burnout!" strapline from a past preview. Maybe they were annoyed they couldn't shoot a cop in the face - and doing it as Vin Diesel, no less! The IGN review was a definite shocker though. The studio suddenly turned from a festival of back-slapping to one of numb shock. Countless e-mails filtered throughout studio inboxes during the next few weeks. Positive. Negative. Positive. Negative. It was quite literally a rollercoaster ride of emotions. The game was selling well in its opening week though - I think a lot of the guys were quite happy in that respect. Sadly, we also learned how Metacritic worked in not only influencing peoples' minds to a possible purchase of our game, but also how they consider some review scores to have more of a weight to them; a weighted average. How ****ed up is that? Unsurprisingly, the IGN review score was weighted, and the Metacritic score dropped like a stone.
Straight after completion of Wheelman, the studio didn't sit on its laurels. We got back to work on a new IP called Necessary Force, and it was a very exciting prospect. Set in the future, our game would put you in the shoes of a street-toughened cop who would have morality choices during his investigation. You would piece together evidence, make connections, go looking for new suspects and interrogate them. Work had already begun modifying the Wheelman engine to a much more gritter and impressive-looking result; the concept guys began producing beautiful renderings of the cityscape, characters and vehicles, while the designers were busy with documentation and possible scenarios. I spent the time producing graphics and concepts for the cop's PDA unit, which would be an integral part of the evidence gathering and manipulation. We had a lot of nice ideas for the game - for instance, the morality system affected the weather and time of day too. If you were a bad-*** cop, the days would feel shorter, and it would rain more often. This was also linked to a system where the city would systematically be cleaned up - more desirable pedestrians, graffiti taken off walls and newer, more optimisitc buildings taking the place of the run-down buildings. Read More...
Ever since the Chapter 11 bankruptcy announcement for Midway as a company, we've been erring on the side of caution. Anything could happen, right? The company was still operating as normal, but the Chapter 11 thing was like a silent dread-spectre hovering over all of us. The cause of this was through some allegedly shady dealings between Sumner Redstone and a bloke called Mark Thomas. No one knew who he was, and he tried to reassure everyone that it was all fine. Alarm bells rang though; it seemed quite, quite dubious. All of a sudden, the company was sold to him for a paltry $100,000 and then a magical legal process ensued where all deadlines for debts accelerated their deadlines for payment. Midway didn't have the funds at the time to pay them, and thus Chapter 11 became part of our legal vocabulary. It was all fine though - we'd still be operational; at that point, we were working on finishing up with Wheelman. The great thing about that was that I (and others) were putting in a lot of latenighters to get the job done, so we were practically too busy to worry about Chapter 11. We just got on with it.
The Ubisoft deal was pretty flawless in its execution, and a necessity to get the game out and marketed to its fullest potential. Some saw this as a sign of weakness on Midway's part, but it turned out to be quite a sweet deal. It gave the company more breathing space and we were happy to see a shiny Ubisoft trailer up on Gametrailers getting some good feedback. Perversely, some people considered the game to be better once Ubisoft was involved, rather than Midway. The company name was unfortunately synonymous with disappointment, cheap and tacky... was it deserved? I'm not sure... it wasn't as if any of us in the studio were skimping on our workloads. We were passionate about what we did, and we all enjoyed playing videogames. I know, it's a cliche, but it's one which runs throughout the industry; people who work on videogames will more likely or not love playing videogames too.
I don't want to think that the Midway taint somehow carried through to the erratic review scores which Wheelman received. Although we saw many, many nuggets of positivity on gaming forums, the journalistic view was distinctly Marmite - they either totally "got" it and enjoyed it, or hated it. People were perhaps expecting a bit too much from the "GTA4 Meets Burnout!" strapline from a past preview. Maybe they were annoyed they couldn't shoot a cop in the face - and doing it as Vin Diesel, no less! The IGN review was a definite shocker though. The studio suddenly turned from a festival of back-slapping to one of numb shock. Countless e-mails filtered throughout studio inboxes during the next few weeks. Positive. Negative. Positive. Negative. It was quite literally a rollercoaster ride of emotions. The game was selling well in its opening week though - I think a lot of the guys were quite happy in that respect. Sadly, we also learned how Metacritic worked in not only influencing peoples' minds to a possible purchase of our game, but also how they consider some review scores to have more of a weight to them; a weighted average. How ****ed up is that? Unsurprisingly, the IGN review score was weighted, and the Metacritic score dropped like a stone.
Straight after completion of Wheelman, the studio didn't sit on its laurels. We got back to work on a new IP called Necessary Force, and it was a very exciting prospect. Set in the future, our game would put you in the shoes of a street-toughened cop who would have morality choices during his investigation. You would piece together evidence, make connections, go looking for new suspects and interrogate them. Work had already begun modifying the Wheelman engine to a much more gritter and impressive-looking result; the concept guys began producing beautiful renderings of the cityscape, characters and vehicles, while the designers were busy with documentation and possible scenarios. I spent the time producing graphics and concepts for the cop's PDA unit, which would be an integral part of the evidence gathering and manipulation. We had a lot of nice ideas for the game - for instance, the morality system affected the weather and time of day too. If you were a bad-*** cop, the days would feel shorter, and it would rain more often. This was also linked to a system where the city would systematically be cleaned up - more desirable pedestrians, graffiti taken off walls and newer, more optimisitc buildings taking the place of the run-down buildings. Read More...
You can read the rest of Steven's story at his official website here.
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