38 Studios staff slowly scattering

EXTRA LIFE: Former 38 Studios artist Joe Mirabello sits at his work station in Sharon, Mass., where he designed his own game, “Tower of Guns.” Mirabello spent almost two years after the close of 38 Studios programming and designing the game. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERRSON
EXTRA LIFE: Former 38 Studios artist Joe Mirabello sits at his work station in Sharon, Mass., where he designed his own game, “Tower of Guns.” Mirabello spent almost two years after the close of 38 Studios programming and designing the game. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERRSON

(Editor’s note: This is the final story in a two-part series looking at the impact of the 38 Studios LLC bankruptcy on the local gaming industry and the company’s employees.)

Three years after Joe Mirabello began his career as an artist at Iron Lore Entertainment in Maynard, Mass., he had made up his mind to go west and find work designing the next blockbuster video game for a big-name West Coast studio – until 38 Studios LLC, then Green Monster Games, opened up right next door.

Mirabello was employee No. 24, one of only nine or 10 artists at a company that eventually would grow to employ dozens of artists and a staff of hundreds before declaring bankruptcy in 2012. Each year since, Mirabello and a band of fellow “38ers” in the greater Boston area gather for an informal reunion, but the group grows smaller every year.

“38 Studios wasn’t in the area long enough for people to establish families and have their kids in schools,” said Mirabello, meaning that the game designers, artists and programmers who had converged on Providence to work on 38 Studios’ in-development massively-multiplayer online video game, known as “Project Copernicus,” had no reason to stay when the company went under and West Coast studios came recruiting.

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Mirabello, who joined 38 Studios before its 2010 move to Providence, is the exception. By the time 38 Studios shut its doors, he had married his wife, bought a house and put down roots. So when he decided to launch his own one-man game studio, Terrible Posture Games, he started up in Sharon, Mass.

“After witnessing a company collapse, I decided I was going to go do my own thing. I don’t want to work for another company that’s going to fall apart,” Mirabello said.

With his wife, Colleen’s encouragement, Mirabello spent almost two years after the close of 38 Studios programming and designing a game of his own creation, while his brother, Michael, developed music for the game. “Tower of Guns,” which combines the combat of a first-person shooter with randomized elements, officially released on March 4, and since then has sold well enough for Mirabello to continue his indie work.

By Mirabello’s own account, developing “Tower of Guns” took 3,850 hours over 20 months – an investment of time and money that many of 38 Studios’ employees weren’t in a position to make when the company shut down.

“The Boston-metro, New England area is hemorrhaging talent right now because there’s nowhere for these people to work,” said Mirabello. “I would say of all the friends I’ve made in the industry, 60 percent have moved out west, maybe 75 percent.”

While Boston and the surrounding suburbs claim a handful of mid-sized game studios, Mirabello said, many of them are struggling. Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems, the developers behind “Dance Central” and “Rock Band,” announced in May it had laid off 37 full-time staff. Earlier this year, Irrational Games in Quincy, Mass., all but closed its doors, reducing its staff from 90 to 15 employees, and MMO developer Turbine Inc. in Needham, Mass., also has seen several rounds of layoffs.

Some 38 Studios veterans who did stay local went to work for smaller Boston-area studios, Mirabello said: Rockstar New England, Disruptor Beam, Subatomic Studios, Rotary Games and others. Subatomic was founded by Jamie Gotch, 38 Studios employee No. 47, who left the company in 2010 to start Subatomic after his iOS game “Fieldrunners” piggybacked on the hype surrounding the newly released iPhone to overnight success.

When 38 Studios shut down, Gotch was able to recruit several of his former colleagues to work for Subatomic, which was ramping up for the release of a sequel to “Fieldrunners.”

“While it wasn’t good news, it was perfect timing,” said Gotch.

Subatomic now employs about 30 people in Cambridge, Mass., including contractors, and five of those employees came on from 38 Studios, Gotch said.

Many who left 38 Studios after its demise, however, took jobs on the West Coast and elsewhere, at Carbine Studios, Blizzard Entertainment, Red 5 Studios and Bethesda Softworks – all companies developing MMOs like the one 38 Studios employees were trained to build.

“I’d hate to call them sharks, because they were giving these people jobs, but when a company with highly trained people goes under, other studios see that as an opportunity,” said Mirabello. “38 spent a long time gathering together a really good team.”

For Les Nelken, who has witnessed firsthand the collapse of three MMO startups, including 38 Studios, layoffs are as much a part of the industry as anything. Nelken was a senior game designer on Project Copernicus, fleshing out the cities within the fictitious realm of Amalur and developing the quests players would explore through the game.

By the time Nelken was recruited for 38 Studios, he already had earned his chops in the industry with a resume that included design work on Turbine’s MMO role-playing games “Asheron’s Call” and “The Lord of the Rings Online” – and he had been laid off from every company he’d worked for.

“Even though it’s never fun at the time – there’s nothing good about a layoff or a company closing – I’ve been lucky in that it’s always led to new and interesting opportunities,” said Nelken.

After 38 Studios closed, he signed on with Canadian MMO startup WorldTribe Media in Vancouver until that company, too, collapsed under the financial pressures of pushing a large-scale game through the long development process of an MMO.

“They’re the hardest games to make,” said Nelken. “They’re huge in scale … and sometimes they’re not successful because they do cost so much.”

After a 20-year career developing some of the biggest games in the industry, Nelken will share what he’s learned with the next generation as an assistant professor of game design and interactive media at Fitchburg State University, beginning this fall.

While skeptics might read his resume as a cautionary tale of a volatile industry, Nelken said he can’t imagine ever leaving the industry for good.

“To me, a bad day in the games industry is better than a good day in any other industry,” he said.

Not all of Curt Schilling’s team stayed in gaming after the company fell apart. Many took jobs in peripheral industries, like Craig Brooks, who parlayed his experience as a 38 Studios games tester into a job as a senior quality assurance engineer for enterprise-scale mobile app developer Mobiquity in Wellesley, Mass.

“I still love games and want to go back at some point, but the downside is, as we’ve seen, the games industry can be volatile,” said Brooks.

Still, he has fond memories of the project itself.

“Copernicus was going to be better [than ‘World of Warcraft’],” Brooks said. “From a designer standpoint, from a character standpoint and things that enemies could do ability wise … A ton of stuff they were putting in the game was much better than what I was playing [at the time].”

It is difficult to gauge the impact “Project Copernicus” might have had on the MMO scene, but both Brooks and Mirabello say they have since seen new MMOs and expansions of existing MMOs emerge with artistic design and gameplay elements similar to what 38 Studios was striving for with Copernicus, perhaps none more so than the recently released “WildStar” developed by California-headquartered Carbine Studios, where a handful of former 38ers have settled since leaving Providence.

Would Mirabello, Nelken and Brooks like to see the rights to Copernicus bought, and the game completed in some form? Maybe, they said, but it would take a company willing to devote the same time, resources and creative energy that the team at 38 Studios poured into the game, and that isn’t easy to come by.

“I’m not sure if I’ll ever work for as good a company as 38 Studios was,” said Nelken. •

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