Mucky Foot: A Post-Mortem

Kieron Gillen has a nice ‘rise and fall’ article over in The Escapist’s ‘Post-Mortem’ issue, which isn’t looking at games so much as the industry …. Mucky Foot was a little studio started by three former employees of Bullfrog, who found that being absorbed into Electronic Arts just really wasn’t working for them:

For [Fin] McGechie, staying at Bullfrog was becoming untenable. “The EA rule book was brought in. I remember Gary and myself getting told off for running in the corridors,” he says. “That was it for me.” In a pub – and Mucky Foot is a developer whose story seems primarily told in pubs – they decided to hand their notice in on a Friday. They’d had enough. “Then, on the Thursday, Guy decided he’d had ‘even more of enough’ and handed in his notice,” McGechie says. “Then myself and Mike did it on the Thursday. By then, I think, everyone had realised.” Diskett elaborates, “We’d actually put very little thought into it. It’s like they say, … you spend more time choosing a pair of curtains than you do choosing the house. It was like that setting up Mucky Foot. We went, ‘Shall we?’ ‘Yeah, c’mon.’ We went off in great ignorance of what it would entail.”

Between ‘97 and 2003, they produced Urban Chaos, Startopia, and Blade II; like many before and after them, though, the games just didn’t sell (or didn’t sell enough). It’s a nostalgic look at a company that was and a really fun ‘interview.’

Footprints: The Rise and Fall of Mucky Foot [The Escapist]