I’ve been cleaning out my hard drive lately and when doing so I tend to come across folders upon folders of old pictures. Recently, one in particular caught my eye. It was titled Comic Con 2010.
During SDCC that year a new studio had emerged with some big name talent and they were about to reveal their first game. It was an epic RPG known as Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and the company was 38 Studios.
I sat in the very front row for the reveal and looked on with wide eyed wonder as Todd MacFarlane, Ken Rolston, R.A. Salvatore and Curt Schilling introduced us to the world of Amalur as only these giants of their respective fields could. In fact, I filmed the entire thing.
Looking back it’s easy to see why so many people got so excited about Reckoning and 38 Studios. As I file through the pictures from SDCC and the piles of swag I had signed by MacFarlane and Schilling, I can’t help but wonder where it all went wrong.
Reckoning came out earlier this year and it was not only good, it was great. It reviewed well, it seemingly sold well, but apparently it wasn’t enough.
I can’t pretend that I’ll ever know what truly went wrong at 38 Studios or who’s to blame. What I do know is that on that sunny San Diego day back in 2010 – four giants of industry set out to succeed blissfully and instead failed magnificently.
Do you remember when Curt Schilling had a promising career in game development? I do. But I suspect that soon it’ll all be lost to the pages of the internet and buried within folders labelled Comic Con 2010.
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