Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment

» see stargateworlds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I cannot tell you what this one was like to play, and neither can anyone else alive. Stargate Worlds spent three and a half years in production and never came out. People registered for a closed beta that was never opened to them. What the studio left behind was concept art and a creditor list.

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment was founded on 1 July 2005 by Gary Whiting, working out of the Phoenix area. Its one asset was a license: MGM agreed to let it build a massively multiplayer game out of Stargate SG-1, and in February 2006 the two of them announced it. By late 2006 the studio was releasing concept art and saying the words Unreal Engine 3, and in November it declared that the project had left pre-production. Brad Wright, who co-created the show, came on as a creative consultant. Senior people talked about how easy the license made their job, because the premise is a door to anywhere and anywhere is a lot of content.

Then 2007 happened to everyone's funding, and development slowed down badly. By 2009 Brad Wright was telling GateWorld he had doubts the game would ever be released, while the publishing arm, FireSky, kept saying publicly that it was still coming and that deals were being arranged to cover the rest of the budget. In February 2010 the studio shipped Stargate Resistance, a small shooter that was supposed to generate enough money to finish the big one. It did not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The game was going to sit in the early seasons of SG-1, before the Atlantis expedition, with the Milky Way as the map and the war between the Tau'ri and the Goa'uld as the backdrop. You would have been able to play as the invaders. Combat was being built to feel like a shooter rather than a hotbar, with an array of ranged weapons lifted from the show.

The piece that sounds like it came from a better game is the Furling. The show had mentioned the race and never shown it, which left the writers a hole with no canon in it, and the senior content designer described the plan as making the Furling one entity stretched across time, able to see forward and backward. Nobody will ever get to find out whether that worked.

~ the money ~

In September 2009 Gary Whiting was sued by the company's own investors. By early 2010 he had been removed from the board and his employment was terminated, though he disputed it. On 12 February 2010 a Chapter 11 petition was filed in Arizona, and GateWorld later reported that the filing had been rejected on the grounds that the man who filed it had already been fired. Employees told reporters the problem was the former CEO's dealings. A suit in Utah alleged he had put Cheyenne into debt to Garvick Properties, an LLC he owned himself.

On 25 March 2010 FireSky posted that CME had entered receivership and that work on the game had stopped. Staff who had been building Stargate Worlds said afterward that they were still owed wages. At least two more investor lawsuits against Whiting and other former executives were reported in 2012.

~ what got buried with it ~

MGM sent a termination notice on 3 November 2010 and the license agreement ran out on 16 November. Stargate Resistance was sold on, first to a studio put together by shareholders and then to Dark Comet Games, which was staffed by people who had worked on it in the first place. The servers went dark on 15 January 2011, ten months after the receivership, and that was the last of anything Cheyenne Mountain had shipped.

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