- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
The closure of Monolith Productions, an innovative video game developer, shows what’s wrong with an industry in which game publishers have the ultimate power to shut down projects and fire workers.
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They made Blood, didn’t they? I always think of Tron 2.0 first, and I don’t know if Monolith even did the game or if it just used the Lithtech Engine.
I will always appear to tell Monolith to go fuck themselves, and dance on their graves.
Fuck you Matt, fuck you Monolith. You fucked our company over, stole our technology, presented it at the game developer conference like it was yours - dealing with you Matt was the worst 2 fucking years of my life you big fat bloated sack of highly-incompetant, completely sleazy and unethical, lazy lying shit.
Care to elaborate?
Truthfully, no. I was a really top level fucker in the industry and let me tell you man… It’s a vicious game, and even thinking about things that happened 30 years ago are causing my hairs to stand on end right now even though I’m sitting with a nice warm espresso in a sunbeam smoking a joint.
I’m going to copy and paste from a previous answer. Please do me the courtesy of not asking any questions about my history in the game industry, because I will go off like a f’king neutron bomb. It will be real but it will be ugly. I mean ask if you want, but you’ll get the fuck beaten out of you and you won’t like it and it’ll disabuse you of, in a most vicious way, your incorrect thoughts, perspective, and fee fees RE anything to do with games. If you want to look behind the curtain man we’re going to look but you won’t like what you see, I can absolutely promise you that, and I will not protect feelings. So before you do, think about it for a little bit, then don’t please.
“They were contracted to design the (edit: low-level coin op hardware, etc) API for our new Internet-enabled touchscreen gaming network kiosks (world first at the time) and they were fucking useless. And then had the gall to present the piece of shit at the CGDG 1997, as a half-finished completely non-functional, but presented it like it was their own product and not a massive NDA violation. Presented like their own product which could be generically extended to other platforms. Fuck you Matt. Fuck you Monolith you fucking cunts.”
Based on his previous comments when he’s brought this up - he appears way, way more outraged than seems to make sense for what happened. From something 30 years ago.
Bro that’s just one incident in three decades of madness
I’m not lying when I tell you I was at the top top bro
I changed the world with my technology
And when you know what’s what, you are sick to your stomach
That’s why I refuse to buy anything, I pick things out of dumpsters, I’m friends with homeless people, I go at 3:00 a.m. and bring them soup, I connect to my community, I volunteer, I serve, I fix electronics, I do what I want every day that makes me happy, I don’t need any illusion anymore
But I would be absolutely thrilled to shatter the bubble of anybody that wants to talk about what they think they know about games
I choose my words very deliberately here and I am intentionally portraying hostility so that anybody with two clues to rub together can see where it’s going to go if they start. I want people to know that you’re dealing with a dragon … if you want to know - I’ll tell you.
I’m a nice dragon but I’ve had it with people who want to talk to me about what they think they know about this realm
I have done anyone reading these comments the courtesy of knowing that it’s not going to go the way they think if they whisper word one to me about games okay, that’s a kindness I’m doing you all in advance lol
And in a way I’m saying don’t fucking ask me, I’ve been dealing with these dumb conversations for 30 years on the internet, if you think you have a single thing to say to me in opposition to what has been said here so far, don’t message me, in fact block me right now on Lemmy
Anybody want to take a shot? Let me begin the conversation so you get a flavor: every single gamer is a gullible magical-thinking rube, an infant in their emotional core. These individuals will spend countless hours performing micro tasks which are puzzle-based in nature, but accomplish nothing, simply to satisfy some primitive emotional logic. These people are the equivalent of children that think magic is real, then they want the magician to explain the trick, then they get upset when they learn that it’s a trick and they want to tell the magician no, magic’s actually real. If you like gaming, I hate you. Because I am a gamer but I know what games are and you don’t.
Do consume other media like books, TV, or movies?
Why post on a games forums when you have such open disdain for the medium and gamers?
They are mentally ill, unfortunately. I hope they get help soon.
You dont sound healthy.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to make such a statement and try to be rude to me when I have meticulously explained, to anybody who with an intelligent mind, specifically why I don’t want to talk about this but you need to push
So how about this, I’ll save the bother and just block you :)
You are literally the type of person that I want to avoid in these kind of conversations, that’s why I go at it things the way I do, but you’re too emotionally confused to get it
Look in the mirror, and realize you haven’t added a single thing here
But the crux of the issue, is that I don’t give a fuck what you think and you CAN’T understand that. IT’S TOO HARD FOR YOU TO ACCEPT THAT I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK
Bye-bye blocked
It wasn’t an insult, you genuinely seem very ill and I hope you get better.
You also clearly do care
Which Matt? :D
No One Lives Forever, F. E. A. R. and Shogo Mobile Armor Division are some of my favorite games ever.
RIP Monolith. Thanks for the experiences.
As a fan of all those games, Monoliths only really good legacy game is FEAR. While NOLF and Shogo are fun, they’re extremely buggy, and the jank is not easy to ignore.
FEAR is still buggy, but its got way less than their other legacy titles.
I don’t recall the jankiness, just that they were fun.
I’ve been trying to get through NOLF this year (never played it before) and it definitely feels janky and clunky. Some pretty awful stealth too. It doesn’t really feel like they’ve aged all that well. Maybe the sequel is better, who knows.
I gave up after a couple of hours as I just wasn’t having fun at all, I realised I was only playing because it’s a classic and I wanted to be able to say I had played it.
I guess 25 years ago it seemed pretty awesome. That’s part of the reason I don’t replay some of these older games; can’t find my NOLF CD anyway. I tried playing Outlaws not that long ago, which is also on my all-time favorite list, and didn’t age well either.
Alien vs Predator 2 was peak Monolith for me.
Tron and AvP too
Phew… This isn’t related to the developer Monolith SOFT.
Had me sweating a bit there
WB Interactive was always such a missed opportunity. Monolith shut down because the studio lost its best talent when they weren’t allowed to work on a new IP, where their creativity took them. Even back during the MOBA fad era (Remember that one? It was after MMOs and before hero shooters and battle royales.), during the development and promotional period for DC’s Infinite Crisis, I spoke to one of the developers from Turbine, asking what the pitch process was under WB. Even back then, this guy told me, “Well, it’s WB, so whatever your idea is, they’ll say, ‘Cool, now make it Batman,’ or ‘Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.’”
If it doesn’t naturally fit with that IP, that’s all backwards. Even in the most capitalistic view I can take on it, the best way forward sounds a lot like keeping an eye on a budding new idea and steering it toward a direction where it can become a good movie or an HBO show, in the event that the game is successful. Because what was obviously always going to happen when WB tried to sell its Interactive component is that their video game division is worthless when their games are all tied to WB intellectual property. It would be like Disney buying Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm so that they could only make Mickey Mouse comics and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.
Damn, i didn’t realize they closed. Aren’t they the studio that made the Middle Earth games? I loved those, they were like AC met Tolkien, shame we may never get another
OR. Hear me out. They haven’t released any game for 8 years. And the last game they made did really well. (Shadow of war)
Reports were they took 8 years because they spent almost 3 of them making a game in a new IP, knowing that WB wouldn’t be happy about it, but it’s what they wanted to make. When that got shut down and forcibly changed into Wonder Woman, most of the talent that had been there the longest decided to just leave.
If they knew that WB wouldn’t like it but still did it anyway, thats honestly on them. They were under WB, they gotta follow their rules. If you want to.make your own thing, dont be owned by a parent company. Leave and make your own studio. Don’t waste your time for years just to leave in the end, thats stupid.
The article didn’t speculate, but that may have been the point. “We’re miserable only making games out of WB movie properties, so you’ll let this next one through, or we’re gone, and someone else will surely have us instead.”
Problem with that is that WB likely owns the IP that they were working on and creating while they were owned or working under a studio owned by WB. WB owns all that work that these developers could have kept for their new studio if they had formed one. Now they have to start over again, meaning all that time they worked on it was wasted. They can’t use it, and WB sure isn’t going to.
I can tell you that no professional (non indie) gamedev cares about that. We know damn well we have no rights over the stuff we make for our overlords.
Creatives absolutely care about art they spend years making, professional or not. They definitely don’t feel happy about wasting all that time for something they can no longer work on.
Care might not have been the right word. I care about my code too, but we know our work belongs to the company so we don’t get too attached. The thing that hurts the most with these layoffs is stopping working with the people (or entire teams) you had a good work relationship with, and, of course, suddenly being out of work.
So why didn’t the guys get back together. Make their own studio and release the game they were working on by themselves?
And how does a subdivision of a developer not know what their company is doing? I find it hard to believe honestly.
According to Jason Schreier, most did go on to form a new studio at EA.
