Silicon Knights’ fall from glory, Eternal Darkness 2 was in the works, less than five staffers currently employed
A report surfaced on Kotaku today that paints a pretty bad picture of Silicon Knights, the studio behind Eternal Darkness.
One former employee told the site that the company suffered because of Denis Dyack’s authoritative control. Once ties with Nintendo were basically broken, Dyack was completely in charge of all operations and the Big N wasn’t there to provide any support.
A source said:
“This is the reason for the extremely high quality games that SK built a reputation on. Nintendo was going to put their name on the game, so it had to be ‘Nintendo quality.'”
Because of Silicon Knights’ previous work, the studio was able to secure projects from Sega, Microsoft, and Activision. One source told Kotaku: “They leverage this by talking about Eternal Darkness endlessly.”
Silicon Knights’ deal with Activision allowed the team to create X-Men Destiny. Unfortunately, as many of you know, it was a complete disappointment. Perhaps that was in part due Dyack’s lack of interest in the project.
Coming from a Kotaku source:
“SK didn’t take the development of XMD seriously the entire time I was there. Denis is not an X-Men fan either, so he didn’t care much for the license. To him, it seemed more like a job to get us by.”
While X-Men Destiny was in the works, Dyack had staffers move to a long-rumored title – yep, Eternal Darkness 2.
“They were working on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo that they could take to publishers. While I was there, they were even siphoning off staff from my team to work on it.”
At one point, there was apparently a rough split of 60% of employees working on X-Men while the other 40% were developing Eternal Darkness 2. That was in spite of the fact that X-Men’s quality wasn’t up to snuff.
Soon, Activision “started to get pretty upset that nothing they mentioned was ever addressed properly and remedied.” Silicon Knights was hoping that Activision would approve a delay, but that didn’t pan out.
Kotaku reports:
“Instead of offering an extension, Activision turned up the pressure by publicly announcing the game, and attaching Silicon Knights’ name to it prominently… The idea was to slow down production more than ever before, to try to apply pressure for an extension.”
X-Men Destiny eventually made it to store shelves. That didn’t really seem to help Silicon Knights, however. Its work on Eternal Darkness was also a disappointment, as one source notes:
“It was really bad, as I recall. It took the side-team a long time to even get that far. Bad tech, combined with a team composed of people who had not shipped a title since Metal Gear really hurt that demo. Other than that, I can’t explain why things went so poorly for them [except that] a lot of key people responsible for the original Eternal Darkness are long gone.”
What’s the situation with Silicon Knights right now, you ask? It doesn’t look good. Kotaku says that the company employs “less than five staff–including Denis Dyack.”
