Flagship Studios closes doors

By Robert Purchese Published 14 July, 2008

Hellgate, Mythos dev no more.

Hellgate: London and Mythos developer Flagship Studios has closed its doors and made all staff redundant.

Work came to an end on Saturday, according to Voodoo Extreme.

The specifics behind the decision are yet to be made clear, but fingers point toward Flagship trying to do too much, too quickly with Hellgate: London.

"Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done. It sucks, but that's life I guess," "GLC", a former Ping0 (digital publisher of Hellgate) employee wrote on the Something Awful forums.

"I think it's less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn't do anything the easy way. It was like picking everything that's hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn't worked together before."

The future of Hellgate: London is unknown. No one has taken over responsibility for the game, with the rights falling into the hands of US money firm Comerica.

Currently there is no option to unsubscribe from the online portion of the game, but apparently there will be no charges applied.

Mythos, on the other hand, will be picked up by Korean company HanbitSoft, which aims to develop the MMO internally.

The closure of Flagship Studios comes after programmer Guy Somberg talked on his blog about staff leaving their jobs in "droves" - a sentiment later covered up by developer bosses as "inaccurate".

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (29) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Squire #1 4 years ago

    Shame.

  • Krelle #2 4 years ago

    Lol at the "we are well within our budget-frame for Mythos" comment a few weeks ago.

  • Bitkari #3 4 years ago

    I guess we'll know who's word to trust next time...

  • Quint2020 #4 4 years ago

    Shame really, i will admit though i was expecting more from the ex Blizzard North guys.

  • LazyDan #5 4 years ago

    "Mythos, on the other hand, will be picked up by Korean company HanbitSoft, which aims to develop the MMO internally."

    Agh... There goes a lot of my hope for that game.

  • Rirekon #6 4 years ago

    "Currently there is no option to unsubscribe from the online portion of the game"

    Sorry what?

  • Goffee #7 4 years ago

    Since when does any company expose its internal financial dealings to the blabbermouth games press?

    You need F**kedcompany.com for that kind of detail.

    Poor buggers, they tried hard!

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #8 4 years ago

    Hellgate is quite an entertaining 3D singleplayer roguelike. I can't imagine wanting to play it as an MMO, though. Perhaps they should have put that out as just singleplayer or coop on its own before trying to build a whole MMO out of it.

  • Tyranix #9 4 years ago

    This makes me sad, and I'm not really sure why since I don't play either of those games. I guess it's just sad that a company who tried their best to bring their dreams to life in a game failed, and failed hard. Ah well, I'm sure most of them will get picked up by other companies soon enough.

  • aldo_14 #10 4 years ago

    I feel sorry for those poor bastards who shelled out for a lifetime subscription....

  • ciril #11 4 years ago

    I still didn't get the Mythos beta key from the tentonhammer competition :(. Maybe that's why...

    I feel sorry for them too, I feel quite lucky my copy of HG:L never arrived as it got lost in the post and the store cancelled my preorder :p
    Edited by 1 at 14/07/08 @ 09:39

  • pmayes #12 4 years ago

    "...not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done."

    Haha - the quote includes the SA obscenity filter :)

  • Evolution #13 4 years ago

    Let's hope Bill can pick himself up after this.

  • mkreku #14 4 years ago

    Will anyone miss them?

  • Eldritch #15 4 years ago

    After buying and playing Hellgate, I can't say I'm sorry for Flagship kicking the bucket. I'm sorry for everybody working on that game and now losing their jobs, but, come on, the game itself sucked big time and looked terrible.

  • penhalion #16 4 years ago

    @Eldrich

    I disagree with the looked terrible part as it looks like every other specular lit, normal mapped, per pixel lit game out there.

    I do agree with the gameplay being cack part though.

  • sneetch #17 4 years ago

    @Eldritch
    "but, come on, the game itself sucked big time and looked terrible. "

    I'd have to disagree on both.

    I don't think it looked terrible there were however just 4 or 5 different area types and so every area (and every monster) looked very familiar. The game was fine for what it was; a first/third person Diablo, it was fun to play through in coop but I could never see how they could really justify charging a subscription for it.

    I guess I wasn't alone there.

    Edit: removing repetition
    Edited by 1 at 14/07/08 @ 10:36

  • PlugMonkey #18 4 years ago

    What a shame. I just picked up Hellgate and am rather enjoying it. Like someone else said though, fun single player slash'em up but can't imagine playing it online, especially not for a subscription.

  • ZuluHero #19 4 years ago

    i always thought there was a cut-down 'free' version of the online component anyway?

  • Orange #20 4 years ago

    I loved the concept of Hellgate London and there were some nice moments, but it did look dated and half finished while playing.

  • Eldritch #21 4 years ago

    To me, randomly created levels with crude texturing are terrible. Half-Life 2 is years older and looks way better. Or take Titan Quest. And what about that voice acting in Hellgate?

    I really, really wanted to enjoy that game, which is why I bought it despite lukewarm (pre)views, but I put it down after approx. four hours. A lack-lustre game that should've been so much more.

    @Orange: Yes, "dated" sums it up quite well.

  • mrt181 #22 4 years ago

    at least hgl's render videos are really great.

  • Eldritch #23 4 years ago

    Yeah, and I'm sure whoever made them won't have a hard time finding a new job.

  • stevetuck #24 4 years ago

    the guys making helgate london were guys that originally left Blizzard after making Diablo... and this last week Diablo 3 was announced... coincidence? :p

  • lagren #25 4 years ago

    HGLs render intro was NOT made by FSS. It was outsourced to Blur Studios ([link url=http://www.blur.com)]http://www.blur.com)[/link]

  • bdc #26 4 years ago

    bye bye

  • ExplodingClown #27 4 years ago

    Eldritch +1

    Hellgate looked so promising. I so wanted to love it. The premise was sooo good and the character designs oozed cool...

    Unfortunately bugs + pitifully weak stabs at humour + serious failures of imagination killed this one for me. For example, the 'hell' mini-levels were dull as shite! Just big marble halls or floating island type affairs. Where was the Hieronymous Bosch/Breughel/Clive Barker style madness? Even a generic Giger rip-off would have been better. All that dreadful, dreadful unfunny crap with 'Techsmith 314' made my toes curl. The voice acting was often *horrible*, amateur hour at it's worst.

    Plus we didn't even get Satan for fuck's sakes, just generic nasties, it could have been 'Space Mutant Invasion: London' for how it felt! At least Doom gave us proper pentagrams and inverted crosses!

  • Fusey #28 4 years ago

    No mention of Flagship fooling everyone into thinking this was a full blown MMO and getting people to pay a subscription fee when in actual fact it was a decent single player game with optional multiplayer components.

    The company would still be alive if they had marketed it as such and made the additional material available as DLC.

    I feel sorry for the FS devs for having bosses who were talking out of their arse holes.

  • Ari #29 4 years ago

    I thought Mythos was a great little game. I hope HanbitSoft does something decent with it...