Midway / Eidos Merger

Is anyone else laughing themselves silly at the rumoured Midway / Eidos merger? I can’t help but feel we’re well served as a gaming public by consolidating all of our mediocre under a single corporate hat.

Well, actually, I’m a little confused as to the current state of Eidos. On the one hand, they produced the original Tomb Raider, but most of the people associated with that have now left. On the other hand they created the appalling game adaptation of Deathtrap Dungeon, but most of the people associated with that have now left. There’s been some saga of buyouts and management changes and for all I know the company could now consist entirely of Ian Livingstone sitting alone in a warehouse in Montreal single-handedly coding the much anticipated new Deus Ex game.

There’s a good chance that there’s a sad little demographic of people out there shaking with quiet fear at this gaming news. I imagine them to be the shy diminutive clan who dutifully forked out their money for those iterations of Tomb Raider which could charitably be described as “somewhat disappointing”, and who thought that the Hitman franchise was “really rather good”. In my mind I see them clustered together in a poorly-lit basement somewhere giving each other group hugs and reminiscing over their Eidos memories; in the background a lone bugler nobly executes The Last Post.

There’s also probably another group who are still busily ripping Liu Kang’s spine from his body again and again and think that a high-pitched voice yelling “Toasty!” is the height of gaming humour. They have a little shrine to Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in their bedrooms and they keep their copy of BlackSite: Area 51 in its original shrinkwrap so as not to spoil its value over years to come. They can’t understand why a top-class publisher like Midway would NEED to merge with anyone, and they’re blissfully unaware that they’re about to be catapulted headfirst into the basement of that Eidos group and forced to make ugly, deformed babies with them.

In any case I call dibs on naming rights for the new merged company. I was bitterly disappointed that I was unable to sell people on the concepts of “Namdai” or “Blactivision” and therefore wish to get my foot in the door early this time by welcoming “Meidwos” into the gaming world.