Namco Pulls Splatterhouse From Developer Bottlerocket?

Splatterhouse

Big fish eating little fish. It's one of the harshest truths of both the animal and business kingdom.

According to Kotaku, the latest rumor is that Namco has yanked the currently incomplete Splatterhouse project from developer Bottlerocket, which would essentially put the California-based studio out of business. Apparently, some sources in the San Diego development community stated that Namco showed up at Bottlerocket HQ on Friday and simply took back all the dev kits and assets for the game. It seems they weren't too happy with the team's progress, and now Namco has supposedly handed it over to their internal team that handled Afro Samurai. Why would Namco wish to take down a developer that's contracted to create a game for them? Well, nobody really knows, but it has to be a colossal pain to remove a game that's nearly complete and be forced to finish it yourself; we're also not sure if Bottlerocket would receive partial credit on this project. Splatterhouse was set to go Gold in early March and it was a last-gasp for the developer. Now, some sources are saying the office has only three months left to operate, and all employees got their last paycheck yesterday.

In our estimation, we just figure that if you can't do the job you've been contracted to do, then the consequences are inevitable. But we certainly don't have the whole story and all of this is just a rumor, so we'll hold off on further speculation.

Related Game(s): Splatterhouse

2/9/2009 Ben Dutka

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