For the past several years Warner Bros. Interactive has been quietly scoping up chunks of the video game industry. From acquiring developers Monolith Productions (F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin), Snowblind Studios (Justice League Heroes) and developer/publisher TT Games (Lego Batman: The Video Game), to acquiring a serious interest in Eidos (Tomb Raider). Now the WB has made another purchase into the gaming biz with their acquisition of Midway Games.
Midway, the publisher behind such major classic franchises as Moral Kombat, Rampage, Joust, Gauntlet, Smash TV and Spy Hunter, filed for Chapter 11 back on February. All hope seemed lost for the company that started in 1958 making mechanical arcade games, and then moved into video games in 1973 with the video arcade games Winner, Paddle-Ball and Leader.
After Midway's very public problems in bankruptcy court, Warner Bros. put in a bid to buy out interest in the company, two of their development studios, and large chunk of their franchises including Mortal Kombat, for the bargain basement price of $33 million. With no other bidders, the courts granted the buyout.
This isn't the first time Midway and Warner Bros. have been connected with Midway having steadily licensed cartoon, movie and comic book properties from the movie studio. Just last year Midway shipped the unusual paring of Mortal Kombat VS. DC Universe.
While the acquisition will keep the Midway name alive, it does come at the cost of Midway's development studios in San Diego and Newcastle, which are not part of the deal. Unless those studios find a separate buyer soon, they will be permanently shut down, adding over a hundred more jobless to what Wanda Meloni in her Gamasutra blog calculates as being "a staggering 8450 game industry professionals" who have been laid off since July of '08.
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