Vigil’s Ben Cureton talks about what it’s like to be the last one out the door.
If you’ve been following the THQ carve-up, then you know at least one asset wasn’t picked up in the fire sale: Vigil Games. This means that the studio will close.
“We’ve all been on edge for the past couple months,” says Ben Cureton, former Lead Combat Designer for Vigil, “Most of us here joked about it just to keep the mood light, but we all knew what could happen. Now I look around and I realize … it did happen.”
Cureton strove to keep the mood upbeat, in a blog post detailing what it’s like to be the last man out the door. After all, he points out, it’s not like he hasn’t been fired before. He’s a twenty year veteran of the games industry; this is hardly the first time he’s had the rug pulled out from under him. “Doing what you love comes with a price,” he says.
What Cureton’s most sorry about is that the team, which put out work he was proud to be a part of, is no more. The project it was working on, codenamed Crawler, would have been spectacular, he says. But Vigil is dead, his team is gone. The office has been stripped. There’s nobody left but him.
“And with that,” Cureton concludes, “my seat is empty.”
The story may not be over yet. Platinum Games, of Bayonetta fame, has indicated some interest; Atsushi Inaba has Tweeted that Platinum might be a buyer “on the cheap“, but at time of writing this is still just talk, with no firm offer made.
Vigil Games made, among other things, Darksiders and Darksiders 2. Its failure to sell means that it is still part of THQ’s chapter 11 bankruptcy, and THQ is still looking for buyers for its unsold assets.
Source: NeoGAF
