Posts Tagged ‘THQ’
By Nathan Grayson on June 7th, 2013.
Remember the days before Volition exclusively made (admittedly marvelous) games about superpowered crimelords/US Presidents dubstep gunning virtual reality aliens? Those were very different times. For one, we didn’t have smartphones or Facebook or music players we have to actively worry about ingesting or anything like that, but mainly that era saw the Saints Row’s developer craft some of the finest space combat sims in all the ‘verse. Unfortunately, Freespace and Freespace 2 couldn’t out-dogfight the then-mighty retail mothership, and the Interplay-published series crashed and burned. But here’s the fun part: Via Volition, Freespace ended up at THQ, who’s now sold it back to… Interplay.
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Freespace, Freespace 2, interplay, THQ, volition.
By Nathan Grayson on May 17th, 2013.
To hear former THQ boss Jason Rubin tell it, Metro: Last Light studio 4A Games is maybe not the best place to work. He doesn’t mean that in a whip-crack-y, everyone’s-a-jerk way, though. Quite the contrary, actually: he recently claimed it was a case of absurdly talented people working elbow-to-elbow in “appalling” conditions. Their offices? “More like a packed grade school cafeteria than a development studio.” Picking up new hardware was apparently also quite the ordeal. “When 4A needed another dev kit, or high-end PC, or whatever, someone from 4A had to fly to the States and sneak it back to the Ukraine in a backpack lest it be ‘seized’ at the border by thieving customs officials,” said Rubin. But what about 4A’s side of the story? Creative director Andrew Prokhorov recently saw fit to chime in.
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4A Games, deep silver, Metro: Last Light, THQ.
By Craig Pearson on May 16th, 2013.
We’ve yet to WiT Metro: Last Light on RPS, thanks to the review code not working, but its recent release has prompted ex-THQ boss Jason Rubin to write an astonishing article on the development of the game. Over at GamesIndustry.biz, Rubin has written an incendiary post on the daily struggles that Kiev-based dev team 4A Games faced, calling their game “a stunning achievement”, and asking for more recognition of their abilities. If accurate, he paints a team building a game with a tiny budget, in a country where implied corruption necessitates smuggling higher-end equipment past customs officials, for a company he describes as “irrational”. I’m British, so my monocle is currently on the floor.
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deep silver, Jason Rubin, Metro: Last Light, THQ.
By Nathan Grayson on May 7th, 2013.
Eventually, Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets will make another game. He’ll just have to make some excruciating blood sacrifice on an arcane altar in some Mayan ruins first, because he is clearly cursed. First he left Ubisoft to chase his new vision, then eventual partner THQ drowned in a sea of unsold uDraws, and now – only a few months after being brought back into the Ubisoft fold – he’s flying solo once again. This time, however, he claims the departure wasn’t voluntary at all. Well, unless you define “being unceremoniously booted out the front door by security guards” as voluntary, anyway.
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1666, Assassins-Creed, patrice desilets, THQ, Ubisoft.
By Nathan Grayson on April 23rd, 2013.
OK, Nordic Games, the jig’s up. You can go ahead and change your name to THQ II: The Rise Of Mecha-Bilson already, because seriously, you just purchased the publisher’s legacy. Sure, Gearbox snagged Homeworld, and the company’s modern heavy hitters found new, loving homes, but Nordic now (pending court approval) owns nearly everything else. Red Faction? Yep. Darksiders? Oh, certainly. And oh man, Titan Quest? Sure, why not. Supreme Commander too. And hey, remember Full Spectrum Warrior? I must admit, I – along with my good friend, Basically The Entire World – had forgotten about it, but Nordic deemed the military tactics sorta-sim worth salvaging. Here’s the kicker, though: all those? Only the tip of the iceberg.
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Darksiders, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Full Spectrum Warrior, red-faction, Supreme-Commander, THQ, Titan Quest.
By Alec Meer on February 27th, 2013.
When Sega plucked Relic from the ashes of THQ last month, it appears they didn’t get the Homeworld license along with it. So for now the sublime space RTS series remains without a home, in an odd case of life imitating art. The Homeworld IP is now up for sale in an auction of THQ’s remaining stuff – as is the likes of Supreme Commander, Red Faction, Darksiders, Titan Quest, Full Spectrum Warrior and a whole host of names known and forgotten.
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Homeworld, Supreme-Commander, THQ.
For My Next Trick, I'll Make Money Talk!
By Nathan Grayson on January 29th, 2013.
Vote with your wallet. We constantly preach it as an approach that actually Makes Important Things Happen, but does it? Does it really? It’s such an easy be-all, end-all argument to toss out, but things are rarely that simple. The recent death of THQ and potential failure of Gas Powered Games’ Wildman represent very tangible examples of how “vote with your wallet” can screech and shatter like so many piggy banks being hurled into a craggy abyss. But there’s hope, too, if you know where to look for it. The industry’s changing. Here’s why that makes us – its most vocal, diehard fans – equal parts more and less powerful than ever.
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feature, Gas-Powered-Games, Kickstarter, Metro: Last Light, Saints Row 4, THQ, Wildman.
By Nathan Grayson on January 25th, 2013.
THQ is dead. Long live… er, not THQ. But its motionless remains haven’t gone undisturbed. A number of major publishers descended, vulture-like, to make off with the choicest cuts money could buy. And also Homefront. Yesterday, however, we had no idea what exactly was next for the likes of Metro, Saints Row, Company of Heroes, Darksiders, and South Park. Sure, they’ve found new homes, but will they fit in? Or will they be forced to live in the cramped cupboards of neglect, with nary a wizarding school in sight? Well, it’s still a bit early to say for sure, but – based on comments from each publisher – things are at least looking up.
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Company Of Heroes 2, Crytek, Homefront 2, Saints Row 4, Sega, THQ.
By Nathan Grayson on January 23rd, 2013.
Update: Helpfully, reader and probable Prince of Handsomeness The JG Man dug up the court form outlining details (including amounts, back-up bidders, etc) of each sale. You can peruse that here.
Original: Well, I suppose it was inevitable. After THQ’s attempt at averting a Humpty Dumpty sales situation failed miserably, the writing was pretty much on the wall. So now the grim reaper’s scythe has hacked the once-gargantuan publisher into itsy-bitsy pieces and scattered any remaining ashes to the winds. On the upside, pretty much every major THQ franchise and developer (minus Darksiders dev Vigil, sadly) landed safely in less-likely-to-kerplode homes. Also, Relic and Creative Assembly live under the same roof now. Can Company of Shoguns: Total Homeworld or some other dream team RTS be far off? Probably. It’s still kind of a silver lining, though, and anyway SHUT UP I’M SAD.
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all of the sadness, bankruptcy, Company Of Heroes 2, Darksiders II, Metro: Last Light, South Park: The Stick of Truth, THQ.
By Nathan Grayson on January 8th, 2013.
OK, hold onto the floppier parts of your brain, because this is about to get a bit complicated. So remember how THQ went bankrupt and fell into bed with “stalking horse bidder” Clearlake Capital? Well, the primary intent of all that was to keep THQ in one piece while dealing with that nasty little “having basically no money” thing, but – at the 11th hour – there was a twist. Creditors decided THQ’s all-or-nothing sales approach wasn’t fair to them (it’d probably pull in less money, after all), and a US bankruptcy court judge agreed. So now THQ’s gone from monolithic one-gulp meal to easily chopped up buffet, and rumor has it that a number of major players are interested in various series, games, and franchises.
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Company of Heroes, Metro: Last Light, Saints Row 4, South Park: The Stick of Truth, THQ.
Wombling weapons-free
By Alec Meer on December 21st, 2012.
Er, I suppose there’s some uncertainty that Metro: Last Light might actually be released, but for now let’s proceed on the basis that THQ have managed to save themselves from the moneyan apocalypse.
Last Light, from an hour or so I spent watching real-time play recently, appears to be almost a do-over of the ambitious but awkward Metro 2033 rather than a traditional sequel. It’s rescuing and remixing the stuff that worked but, as far as I can tell, without devolving into a shiny Call of Dudebro affair. That critical switching between indoor and outdoor action and gun-free survivor settlements remains, as does the strange bullets-as-currency system. It’s much more like 2033 than I’d presumed, I’m relived to find, glossier though it may be.
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feature, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, THQ.
