In Which I Briefly Return From Work And Twitter

The super secret MMO being worked on by a super secret team that included Scott Jennings has been laid off.

Mist still surrounds the project and its details, but Matthew Weigel (also now currently looking for a job) had this to say;

For the last year, I've been working on an unannounced strategy MMO based on an IP I can't talk about.

And;

...and then I worked on an unannounced and now canceled project for 2K Games as part of their former Austin office.

Strategy MMO? 2K Games?

Sid Meier's Gettysburg: The MMO. Believe.

(Good luck, guys)

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Edit:

Some more information courtesy of Jon Jones' LinkedIn:

Art Outsourcing Manager

2K Games Austin

(Public Company; TTWO; Computer Games industry)

September 2008 — October 2009 (1 year 2 months)

• Worked on a very small incubator team that was developing a pre-production prototype for an MMO strategy title.

• I joined the team to develop a robust art outsourcing pipeline from the ground up to prepare to outsource up to 80% of the game’s total art assets, to find and test outsourcing vendors, selected an art studio to develop a great deal of concept art (everything from avatar characters to ground units to different cultures’ architecture to large, splashy marketing pieces), to work with the art director to develop a unique art style, cast a dragnet across various art schools and online forums to find and hire an art intern which I then brought aboard and helped manage, and also created art myself where needed.

• In addition to the management and direction aspects of my role, over the course of the project I also designed a fully functional and robust morph target \ wire parameter-driven fully customizable player avatar creation system based in 3DSMAX, developed the overall design of the city layouts throughout the various ages of history, designed a fully modular and customizable system of player throne rooms they can outfit with items they win or buy in the game, modeled, textured, rigged and facial-rigged characters, and created a series of low polygon highly optimized building models with a small set of textures that can be reused across that nation’s entire series of buildings appropriate to that age.

Wait, hold it. Zoom in.

...everything from avatar characters to ground units to different cultures’ architecture...developed the overall design of the city layouts throughout the various ages of history...and created a series of low polygon highly optimized building models with a small set of textures that can be reused across that nation’s entire series of buildings appropriate to that age.

I didn't want to say Civilization before, but... Civilization?

YEEAAAAHHH!!!

 

(Facebook won?)

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Edit 2:

Dan Magaha's LinkedIn provides a little more information:

Founder / Studio GM / Sr. Producer

2K Games Austin

(Public Company; TTWO; Computer Games industry)

September 2008 — October 2009 (1 year 2 months)

Pitched and founded a new 2K Games incubation studio in Austin to prototype a MMO adaptation of an existing franchise. I recruited the team, managed the establishment of the studio and set the overall direction of the project, managing relationships with the IP holder and 2K Games corporate. As the company’s only source of MMO expertise, we were chartered with the tasks of educating the company on issues relating to MMO development and market strategy and given the authority to determine how best to adapt the franchise into an MMO.

In less than eight months of development, our team of ten developers built a working, custom multiplayer client and server prototype from scratch. The prototype included numerous game systems and a rudimentary 3D engine using Gamebryo. The team also developed an iconic visual style for the game which took the IP in a bold new direction that was designed to favor low system requirements and attract players familiar with highly stylized Asian-inspired MMO’s. We drafted whitepapers and provided detailed financial projections, staffing plans and market assessments.