Techokami

In October 2013, 2K laid off everybody at 2K Marin, a couple months after shipping the project that killed it. A single digit number of people moved to positions at other entities within 2K, but there was nobody still at the company who could truthfully say, "I work at 2K Marin". The studio was absolutely, for all intents and purposes, shut down. However, the company (2K, or its parent company Take-Two Interactive) never announced anything to this effect. Sometime near the end of 2015, 2K Marin's website went from being a typical dead company website - last updated more than two years earlier - to redirecting to 2K's corporate site.

The year after its closure, CEO Strauss Zelnick baffled everyone by claiming that 2K Marin was responsible for the future of the Bioshock franchise. A great collective "huh???" issued from everyone who had been there or knew anything about the situation.

Around that time, Irrational Games closed with a rather infamous letter from its remaining founder that made it sound like this was about him finding an exciting new direction in life rather than dozens of his employees being put out on an ice floe, as thanks for shipping another incredibly troubled project. And the following year, 2K gave a brief statement that 2K Australia - née Irrational Games Australia and, curiously and confusingly, renamed as simply another branch of 2K Marin for a brief period between April 2010 and November 2011 - had been shuttered.

It's still unclear why 2K Marin's closure was never publicly announced. Was it about avoiding a "[company] closed one of their studios" news cycle? Was it about keeping the studio alive on paper for tax or revenue reporting reasons? Was it about evading some sort of (ex-)employee protection regulations? And what was the deal with them renaming the Australia studio and then reverting it?

Last week, we got another baffling peek into Zelnick's world as he insisted "we didn't shutter those studios" and "we haven't shuttered anything" in regards to Roll7 and Intercept Games, two of the latest casualties in the industry-wide bloodbath ongoing since last year. Further into the interview:

... sometimes we do have to make hard choices. We just tend to leave those announcements to the label, we don't tend to talk about them, so we're not trying to be cute or difficult today. It's just that we don't tend to bring those discussions into these meetings.

Again, I don't really know what game he's playing here. I would certainly like to know. I would love to see some good investigative journalism that drills into the heart of whatever it is that keeps happening here, and possibly paddle his ass but good in an uncomfortable interview.

Any time a group of creative people are working well together and they are broken apart by circumstances not of their choosing, it is a tragedy. After EA did a big round of layoffs at Origin Systems in 2001, and it was clear that the studio was on its way out, employees both ex and current held a bonfire and wore t-shirts with a past-tense rendering of the studio's motto: "We Created Worlds". I wasn't there but I still get a little choked up thinking about that. The studio wouldn't be officially closed until 2004, but it seems like people knew what was coming and did their mourning. And in the end, there was at least a definite moment in time, a statement, a headline, that announced the closure.

Beyond whatever legal, fiscal, and PR goals Zelnick is trying to meet here, I think the way he and his company communicate about the closures that they do is completely fucking shameful. It is clown shit. It is reason enough to never consider working for them - after ample evidence that it won't matter that you did a good job, your grave will be unmarked.

It's bad enough that every industry layoff announcement is the same robotic bullshit about "making the difficult choice" and attempts to smooth over the reality of dozens or hundreds of people suddenly thrown out of a plane with or without a hankie for a parachute. But likewise, there is an industry standard way of saying "We closed [studio]". And when you don't say it plainly, you owe people an explanation of why - in the absence of which, it is entirely reasonable we (creators, the press, everyone) assume the worst intentions and inquire accordingly.