When Midway scrubbed their Austin studio and binned a game nobody had ever heard about – Career Criminal – many people were left, well, nonplussed. After all, it’s a bit hard to get worked up over a game that you’ve never heard of. But a few retrospective tears may be in order today, as Variety brings word that Hollywood director Tony Scott was attached to the project. Don’t know Tony Scott? Dude directed Top Gun. And the last of the great corny action movies, True Romance. He was working as a kinda creative consultant, continuing a recent trend/fascination Midway have had with getting Hollywood types working on their games (John Woo/Stranglehold, for example). So while we may never see Career Criminal, we can at least rest assured that if we had, guitar solos, sexually-charged one-liners and dimly-lit sex scenes would have featured prominently.
Tony Scott was attached to Midway’s canceled Career Criminal game [Variety][Pic]
Matt Booty, interim CEO and president of Midway, emailed employees of the company today, explaining the reasoning behind the shuttering of its Austin-based studio and the decision to nix the unannounced Career Criminal. The game, described by Booty as a “a large, ambitious, open-world project” was dropped — and most of the team laid off — because the “resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile for the Career Criminal project were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success”.
In the e-mail forwarded to Kotaku this afternoon, Booty emphasises that Midway’s Austin studio will soldier on, albeit with a much, much leaner staff, and continue to work on “other projects in development at the studio” as well as house its Central Outsourcing Group.
The full communication from Booty to employees can be found after the jump.
