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Upon yesterday's news of Mythic shutting down, former studio boss Mark Jacobs offered Eurogamer the following parting words detailing the company's rise and fall. For the last 24 hours, I've been pretty consumed with the news: the studio I co-founded is being shut down by EA. What I hope people remember, and what I've been focusing on since yesterday, are not the games of Mythic, but rather the teams that made them.
There was the first team, or "old" Mythic. About a dozen folks made online games from 1995 to 1999, when online games had gone from an afterthought in the games industry (MUD? What's a MUD?), to the "next big thing," and then back again to a niche market. These guys and gals - including the studio's co-founders - accepted pay cuts, "turtle mode" (literally counting paperclips), and incredibly low budgets (the one exception being Aliens Online, for which we were paid $450K) to create more than a dozen online games, including games based on major Hollywood licenses. We all worked long hours and weekends because we believed that online games still had a big future, despite a dire forecast when our primary sources of revenue - Engage Games Online, Kesmai, and the AOL Games Channel - were shut down, merged, or otherwise became non-viable options.
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