God is dead
Take 2 absorbs what is left of the Gathering
Following recent rumours, the Gathering of Developers today revealed that it is indeed closing down. What started out as a developer-friendly independent publisher designed to follow in the footsteps of movie studio United Artists was soon relegated to the status of just another label for Take 2 Interactive. Today the dream finally came to an end with the announcement that Take 2 will be closing down the Texan company and running the God Games label from its own New York offices in future. Founder Mike Wilson will be leaving with several other God employees to launch a video-magazine featuring short films, music videos, documentaries and trailers.
Although God recently achieved chart-topping success with Max Payne, its games have mostly sold poorly despite often getting positive reviews, and many of them (including Max Payne itself) fell many months behind schedule. The result was disastrous. In a brief interview with GameSpot, Mike Wilson revealed that God ran out of cash three times during its short existence, eventually leading to the company selling its remaining 80% to minority stake-holder Take 2 in June 2000. This was effectively the end of the road for God, with many of the developers which had helped to form it apparently annoyed to find themselves locked into a publishing deal with what had become a subsidiary of Take 2, instead of the groundbreaking independent publisher they had set out to create.
At the end of the day though, Mike Wilson says that his decision to leave the company he had founded just a few years earlier came because "I'm not a gamer now and I haven't been for a long time", adding that "I always told myself if I ever hit that point I would get out". God Games now becomes an in-house label for Take 2, which will probably still be used for games such as Duke Nukem Forever and Myth III.