Curt Schilling's Disastrous Role-Playing Games Find a New Home

THQ Nordic announced Thursday that it has purchased all of the intellectual property produced by developer 38 Studios—including everything related to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. If you don't quite remember Kingdoms of Amalur, that's understandable: Amalur was a pretty good role-playing game from 2012 that doomed a studio, cost Rhode Island taxpayers around $28 million, and launched a fleet of investigations from the SEC and FBI.

Way back in 2010, former Major League Baseball player Curt Schilling moved his video game studio to Rhode Island in exchange for a $75 million economic development loan. The deal was to fund development of an ambitious new RPG and bring almost 500 jobs to Rhode Island. After the move, the studio hired heavy hitters: Fantasy best-seller RA Salvatore wrote 10,000 years' worth of lore and history for the world behind Amalur, and comic book artist Todd McFarlane produced art for the RPG project.

Long story short: In 2012, the RPG launched as Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, got pretty warm reviews, and sold over a million copies. Ordinarily, that would have been a big win, but 38 Studios declared bankruptcy a couple of months later. Thanks to financial drama and heavy loans behind the scenes, Kingdoms of Amalur had needed to sell at least three million copies just to break even. Instead, everyone lost a lot of money, the entire staff got laid off, a bunch of lawyers spent a couple of years in court, and the whole thing burned down. The ashes were finally left to cool with a settlement in early 2017. The settlement repaid the state of Rhode Island with $2.5 million from Schilling and other co-founders, $25.6 million from lenders like Wells Fargo and Barclays, and nearly $17 million from other funders. The state itself was still on the hook for $28 million out of that original $75 million loan.

The dramatic undercurrent running through all of this upheaval came from Schilling himself, who spent the entire meltdown and the years since espousing far right views. Since the failure of 38 Studios, Schilling has been suspended from his job at ESPN for comparing Muslims to Nazis, then eventually fired from ESPN for posting anti-trans memes on Facebook. He became a big supporter of Donald Trump, hosting poorly attended rallies during the 2016 election. He thought it was very important to go on Fox News and explain that he, like Trump, also comments on the attractiveness of pre-teen girls. Most recently, he joined a Breitbart radio show to express support for white supremacist and failed senatorial candidate Paul Nehlen. So that's fun.

Now that THQ Nordic has scooped up the only worthwhile thing that came out of the whole debacle—an extensive 10,000-year history written by a respected fantasy author and art direction by the legendary creator of Spawn—we can have some hope that the RPG has found a new home. Before Amalur even launched, the studio had announced plans to develop a huge MMO based on the universe. THQ Nordic hasn't said if it has any plans to revive that project.

THQ Nordic itself has been on a run the last few years, acquiring companies and intellectual property—including the name "THQ" itself—by the handful. Since 2013, the studio has purchased the full catalogs of several defunct development companies, including legendary games like Red Faction, Delta Force, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Presumably, they'll actually do something with all of these ideas eventually.