NYTimes.com offers "Curt Schilling, Rhode Island and the Fall of 38
Studios," a very lengthy and detailed look at the startup studio that ended up
costing baseball star Curt Schilling and the state of Rhode Island a lot of
money. Nobody comes out looking too good after all this, as the article details
the naïveté of game development neophyte Schilling taking on the most ambitious
type of game in undertaking an MMORPG, and the sketchy history of politics in
Rhode Island ("Rhode Islanders are used to being played by their politicians.
What makes them cringe is the suspicion that virtually all their elected leaders
might have been played by someone else."). They touch on an interstate rivalry
with Massachusetts which played a part in Rhode Island's overreach here, and the
behind-the-scenes machinations to facilitate the state's hefty loan to the
company, which prompted the one dissenting voter to say: "Scandal finds money."
The article is filled with detail on problems inherent in this situation, such
as 38 Studios needing to control costs at the same time they were trying to live
up to the pumped-up promise that they would bring new jobs to the state and how
former 38 Studios CEO Brett Close urged releasing Amalur in smaller phases,
rather than "trying to build the skyscraper horizontally and then standing it
up." They sum up the current legal proceedings between Rhode Island and
Schilling, and offer this interesting take: "At bottom, 38 Studios may be that
rare political scandal that grew not from any lies that anyone told the public,
but from the stories that desperate politicians told themselves." Thanks nin via
Kotaku.