FASA Studio

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

~ the last words ~

FASA Corporation was a Chicago tabletop company from 1980, and the acronym stood for Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration, Freedonia being a fictional country borrowed from a Marx Brothers film. It owned BattleTech and Shadowrun, two settings with enough internal history behind them to carry decades of licensing. In 1994 Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock set up a separate company, FASA Interactive Technologies, to turn those settings into video games, and it picked up the MechWarrior series almost immediately. MechCommander came out in 1998 through MicroProse and Hasbro Interactive.

Microsoft bought FASA Interactive on 7 January 1999, renamed it FASA Studio, and moved its sixty developers from Chicago to the main campus in Redmond. Weisman was named creative director of Microsoft's entertainment division. He left in 2002, and years later said in public that Microsoft had destroyed the development culture at FASA, which is a fairly specific complaint to make about a company that had just paid for your studio. From 1999 the studio built only for Windows and Xbox, under the Microsoft Game Studios banner.

I can follow the first half of that output and not the second. MechWarrior and MechCommander were PC games, and the PC was the only machine that counted where I was playing, at home and then in the internet cafes between about 2002 and 2005 where every screen in the room had Counter-Strike on it. From MechAssault onward the studio's releases went to the Xbox, a console I never sat in front of and rarely saw. Microsoft had bought FASA specifically to fill out a console lineup, so it spent its last five years building for a machine that barely registered where I was.

~ the record ~

~ what it shipped from Redmond ~

MechWarrior 4: Vengeance arrived in 2000 and MechCommander 2 in 2001, both on Windows, both continuations of what the studio had been doing in Chicago. Then the work turned. MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries came in 2002 with Cyberlore Studios helping, and in the same year MechAssault landed on Xbox, co-developed with Day 1 Studios and timed to the opening of Xbox Live. It was a launch-window title for that service and one of the reasons people paid the subscription in the first year.

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge followed in 2003, a pulp aerial combat game with a tone nothing else at Microsoft was making, and MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf came in 2004. After that the public record is mostly cancellations. MechWarrior 5 had already been killed in 2003. A second Shadowrun project and a third Crimson Skies were both killed before release, and the studio went three years without shipping anything at all.

~ Shadowrun, and then nothing ~

The thing that finally came out in May 2007 was called Shadowrun, and it was a competitive multiplayer shooter. Technically it was impressive: it was the first game to put Xbox 360 players and Windows players into the same match, which is now ordinary and in 2007 was not. Commercially and culturally it was a disaster. The Shadowrun name belonged to a dense cyberpunk role-playing world with twenty years of fiction attached to it, and what shipped under that name was a round-based team shooter with no story campaign anywhere in the box.

It sold badly on both platforms. On 12 September 2007 Microsoft confirmed the studio was being closed. A Community Manager and a Technical Support Manager kept their jobs to keep the existing games running, and the remaining staff were moved into other studios under Microsoft Game Studios. Microsoft held on to the game rights for MechAssault and Shadowrun, which it had paid for in the first place.

~ the rights went home ~

In December 2007, three months after the closure, Weisman licensed the electronic rights to the FASA properties back out of Microsoft for a new venture called Smith & Tinker. That company put its money into a browser game for children called Nanovor, which this site has already buried, and Smith & Tinker was wound up itself not long after. The MechWarrior license went on to other hands and the series kept going without any of the people who started it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »