Friday, February 13, 2009

Midway File For Bankruptcy

Midway have filed for bankruptcy, taking them another step towards the end of their prolonged struggle against insolvency. This is really less to do with the global financial situation and more to do with their ongoing inability, over a great many years, to produce games that don't suck.

Bad news (unless you work at Midway) is that they're nevertheless going to continue trading rather than going into liquidation. That allows them to keep perpetrating Mortal Kombat vs DC upon an unsuspecting world, and, if we're extra unlucky, maybe even keep releasing new games.

None of these developments have suddenly taught Midway how to create things that are fun, so the future almost certainly involves some winding-up at some point. Hopefully such talent as they have employed there will wash up on sunnier shores, and the villains responsible for Gauntlet: Dark Legacy will flee to Argentina to escape the wrath of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

5 comments:

Phrancq said...

Ha ha ha! That's a pretty big blow for them. Now... they're Midway??

Hmmm, we need a failure to compare them to.

Morgan said...

Having read your post, I rushed to Wikipedia to try and find a point to argue, but alas, it does seem like Midway is the Tuggeranong (teehehe Canberra joke!) of games developers. It's a pity that their games will continue to haunt us for a while to come.

[My apologies to all the Tuggeranong residents out there, it's not you, it's your crappy shopping mall. Mostly.]

Phrancq, you could argue that Midway is like Pandemic Studios... except that Pandemic developed the Star Wars Battlefront Games.

Chris said...

I regularly buy Midway games... well, I regularly buy collections of old Midway arcade games. >:)

The last new Midway game I enjoyed was Gauntlet: Legends, which despite its flaws was a genuinely interesting arcade cabinet back in 1998. What a shame Dark Legacy was so awful, and the console versions doubly so - the Gamecube version is the buggiest console game I have ever played!

Greg Tannahill said...

Yes, it was terrible.

I enjoyed Gauntlet Legends at the arcade. I also have very fond memories of the first two Mortal Kombat games and the original NBA Jam. Those were all titles that really put 'fun' first and foremost and hung everything else off that.

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