Our farewell to Pandemic Studios
Pandemic Studios, begun in 1998 as an offshoot of Activision by Josh Resnick and Andrew Goldman to develop sequels to Dark Reign and Battlezone, has been shuttered by current owner EA. The studio will remain open until the launch of their upcoming title The Saboteur, and then will be disbanded, with key players being absorbed by EA LA.
Let’s be frank: “Key players” means a skeleton crew who can support The Saboteur after launch, and until the DLC and patches hit. Expect two, possibly three DLC packs for The Saboteur and probably two patches. If The Saboteur does well (read: it becomes EA’s Assassin’s Creed), there will be a sequel, and core Sab team members will work on it along with a new support staff from EALA. If The Saboteur does not do well, it will have been Pandemic’s eulogy piece.
As a site that has been intimately involved with Pandemic Studios, this hits home kind of hard today; and it makes us realize that it was the people we worked with, and not the company behind them, that really made Pandemic a great studio. Sitting in the queue of articles on the whiteboard here in the Icrontic offices is a draft entitled “Corporate Culture at Pandemic Studios”, a story that will now never get written. (more…)
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