It is my sad duty to report that with only 2 months development time to go,
CHARYBDIS Limited, the UK-based game developer, has folded.
Tony Smith, Chairman of Hit & Run Music (Publishing) Limited,
(and 75% shareholder and Director of Charybdis)
put the company into liquidation on Monday, 2nd April.
The timing was awful - the AOM project had only a playtesting/bug fixing phase to complete,
with little to no new content being added before completion for the end of May, 2001.
The disbanded team was responsible for PC titles
such as "The Art of Magic" for VIE, "Machines" for Acclaim and "the Quivering"
(a full company profile can be found
here).
Both
avault
and
euniversegames
report that
Climax Entertainment (nottingham studio) has announced that it will hire a majority of the design studio's
former staff with immediate effect.
See the full PR here.
What's the future for "The Art of Magic" ?
With so much money invested in the project,
and so little to be done to complete it,
it stands to reason that the publishers don't see the issue as concluded.
AOM is down, but not out...
According to
eurogamer,
Virgin PR manager Jon Brooke confirmed that this is not the end of the game.
Virgin own the rights to the title, and will be passing it on to another development team,
with an announcement of who will be picking up the duty of finishing the 3D role-playing strategy game expected in the near future.
Unfortunately this latest setback has "moved the project back to September" from its planned summer release
From a fansite point of view,
I'm confident that the game wil still hit the shelves, if a little later,
and so this site will continue to be updated as if nothing had happened.
More details will follow...
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