Around the video game industry, this news was met with a mix of shock and disbelief. Molasses Flood’s tale begins on February 18, the day when BioShock creator Ken Levine announced he was shuttering Irrational Games.
We’ve seen this story repeated dozens of times in the last few years with studios like Sucker Punch, Sony Santa Monica, and Eidos Montreal. The result of this is a new reality in which a job well done is rewarded by a round of layoffs. This immense overhead is proving hard to maintain, especially as the studio regroups to another cycle of prototyping and pre-production for a new project, where smaller, more agile groups are needed instead of the massive production staff. By the time a major triple-A game is released, the development team has often swelled to several hundred highly paid professionals. This is their story.Īs modern game development becomes increasingly complex and expensive, the old studio model is beginning to break.
This treacherous path is filled with both possibility and uncertainty. Instead of pursuing lucrative jobs at major game studios, Molasses Flood – like so many former triple-A developers – is forging its own way with the promise of independence, ownership of its own creations, and the chance to build a company from the ground up. Unlike most of those small teams, the Molasses Flood (as they’ve named themselves) is made up of people who have worked on some of the most critically acclaimed games in history, including BioShock, Guitar Hero, Halo 2, and Rock Band.įrustrated with the constraints of large-scale console development and worried by increasing instability in the industry, the team united around an ethos of creativity, collaboration, and friendship. In many ways, they are no different than hundreds of small indie developers putting in long hours, pinching pennies, and subsisting on takeout pizza and ramen noodles. In the Boston suburb of Cambridge, six people sit in a cramped room in the basement of a nondescript office building, working on a dream.
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