If ever there was a need to learn how to fill bin bags with cash and throw it out of a window on a windy day then Midway would be your tutor, well educated in the process of ramming as much cash into a shredder as it possibly could with no real control of how to stop it. Studios like Surreal in Seattle, Midway Newcastle and Midway in Austin Texas had burn rates which ran in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to maintain the development and churn required month in and month out. MAG (Multi Action Genre) games were all the rage for the Midway Luminati who's only real strategy was to throw a ton of money at several large games and reinvent the action genre with a Hollywood twist, in order to do that you need people, lots of people, studios were staffed with headcounts in excess of 80+ people full time to crank those projects out.
Chicago was busy on John Woo's Stranglehold and Ed Boon was putting the late nights on Mortal Kombat Vs DC, Midway Austin had pretty much wrapped on Area 51 Blacksite but not before kicking it's creative director Harvey Smith out the front door after comments he made about the game to press at the Montreal Games Festival. Midway Newcastle was busy dealing with Hollywood diva Vin Diesel who, much to everyones irritation, didn't bother showing up to pre booked VO recording sessionson several occasions (and even when he did he'd stay there for 3 hours rewriting the VO script so no work got done anyway). As for Austin they had also been chipping away on a semi open world heist game called Criminal, a title it had been working on for 4 years to the tune of $20 Million spent on "research and development". The only major problem was, after 4 years, it had very little to show for it save for huge amounts of stunning concept art pinned to its office walls, Terabytes of pre rendered sequences, a script with Hollywood director Tony Scotts semi approval and a protagonist that could walk around sections of the open world but couldn't drive anywhere or use the vehicles in it.
Jump ahead to around mid 2009 when the money woes began to kick in, the decision came to scrap Criminal and close Austin despite the thousands of man hours spent on the game. Surreal Studios on the other hand had been busy for the last few years trying to figure out where to position This is Vegas, yet another attempt at an open world product that had been given the moniker the 'poor man's Grand Theft Auto' but with added gambling and a fucked up story involving Pandas and hotel room buggery. These guys were on full churn and burning through cash like it was going out of fashion.
The release date was a fluid one in that it kept changing after quarterly product reviews and the game went back at least 3 times in the space of eighteen months when I worked on it, finally I took myself off the project and dumped it on the new guy who started in my dept. I couldn't focus on it anymore and I didn't have the same enthusiasm as when I started on it and the only persona it had was that of a turtle on its back flailing its limbs about...stuck. This is Vegas looked pretty good to be honest but the longer it went on in development hell the more features got cut, things went from bad to worse when Midway Chicago decided to release a trailer that confused the hell out of everyone with an IGN exclusive. This in turn caused the forums to light up and totally rip it apart, on and on it went, "we need more time and money" came the cry from the studio over and over again. By now the budget had gotten way out of control, $35 Million dollars out of control to be precise, and in the final days when Midway was scrambling around for a buyer the game still needed another $15 Million dollars and another eighteen months in order to wrap it, by then of course most of the game was out dated. Its kind of like the guys who paint the Golden gate bridge, by the time they finish it they have to go back to the start to repaint it again because the first coat is flaking off.
To cut a long winded story brutally short, Warners bought Midway for $33 Million, about the same amount Midway had pumped into John Woo's Stranglehold as a dev budget back in 2007. For this fee they got all the studios and I.P and complete control over back catalogue, much of the studio staff were either let go or integrated into the current Warner Bros development teams.
By E3 2010 Warners had long since broken up what was left of Surreal and called it quits for This is Vegas, an act that highlighted the power of Warner Bros but also an incredible waste of time,money and talent. The waste was pretty prolific because invested properly it could have been spent on smaller dev projects for better returns had Midway senior management been much more akin to what the market actually wanted rather than what they thought it needed (which wasn't a poor mans GTA). The real gem of course was Mortal Kombat, Warners only really had eyes for the ultra violent beat em up to add to its catalogue which it was expanding having also bought the rights to Lord of the Rings when EA decided to walk away from the franchise. Midway destroyed itself with bad management, the tactic of throwing lots of money at a problem doesn't always fix it, sometimes it over complicates it. Midway had excelled at recruiting good studio talent, something it was very proud of, it employed some of the best the games industry had to offer at studio level, in the end these people were badly let down by decisions that never made any sense, the problem was there just wasn't any direction or accountability. The mounting cash spend was a mutating mess that had been locked away in a backroom which everyone chose to ignore hoping it would go away. It didn't and it grew so big that it busted out of the room and became a monster everyone couldn't help but notice and was far too late to do anything about. And that ladies and gents its a super abrigded version of how to blow $45 Million dollars on absolutely nothing.
Sidenote: What else can you get for $45 Million?
Talking of bridges-I've since found out that $45 Million was the amount that California was proposing to spend erecting an anti suicide net on the Golden Gate Bridge to deter jumpers from throwing themselves off it -there's probably a hidden message in that somewhere.
Its the net worth of Rob Drydeck
Its the per season budget of Game of Thrones
Its what NBC paid Conan O'Brien off with
Its the total cost for upgrading the Royal Norwegian Air Forces radar systems
Googles main man Larry Page bought a yacht called 'Senses' with it
It buys you this house
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