Top Story
Take-Two poached staff from Kerbal Space Program 2 developer
Take-Two apparently started contacting employees of Star Theory Games on LinkedIn before the company had the opportunity to inform its staff that the publisher was reassigning the project they were working on to another studio.
Star Theory was working on Kerbal Space Program 2 for Take-Two subsidiary Private Division, and Take-Two’s Michael Cook decided to personally inform staff that cancelling the project was “incredibly difficult decision for us to make, but it became necessary” as the publisher was concerned about the “execution and integrity of the game.”
Brain drain: The Kerbal Space Program 2 gig was the studio’s only source of income and Cook’s messages offered positions at a new studio that would take over development of the game. Over the next few weeks, a third of Star Theory’s staff had moved on to Take-Two’s new studio.
Launch delay: “More than half of the team is now at Intercept Games,” said Private Division’s Brian Roundy. Star Theory Games was founded as Uber Entertainment in 2008, developing Monday Night Combat before launching a successful Kickstarter campaign for Planetary Annihilation. Kerbal Space Program 2 has been delayed into 2021.
Time For A Quick Daily Quiz?
Game Gear had an accessory allowing it to run games from which console?
- The Virtual Boy
- The Master System
- The Mega Drive
- The Atari Lynx
The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today’s issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.
Daily Fact
N. Sane Trilogy had a fake Easter egg
If you completed Vicarious Visions’ Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and completed it 100%, you may have noticed an Easter egg in various levels.
The Easter egg is lifted from the Japanese Crash Bandicoot manga Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken, where the villain Cortex created a Crash doppelganger called Fake Crash.
The bucktoothed wonder first appeared in Crash Bandicoot Warped, but the N. Sane Trilogy inserts him into the first two games as well.
Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss today’s fact.
What Was That SEGA Announcment?
Famitsu magazine’s big scoop is Sega’s arcade fog gaming initiative
Famitsu’s big Sega-related scoop has been revealed, and it is… fog gaming?
The big idea is to allow arcades to operate outside business hours, and help them bring in more revenue. Arcade machine CPUs and GPUs will be exploited when arcades are closed, and could theoretically be used for both gaming and other applications.
Low latency, low costs: There’s not a lot of information yet, but Sega touts ‘ultra-low latency’, which is definitely important for twitchy arcade games. In any case, Sega intends the service to use existing arcade hardware, which makes it a cost-efficient way for arcades to expand their business.
Not quite a cloud: Fog computing is not a new idea: Somewhat related to edge computing, fog computing places data and processing closer to the user than the massive data centers, and is used for latency-sensitive applications. The service is presumably going to be local to Japan, since there aren’t many arcades left elsewhere.
