Monkeystone Games

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

~ the obituary ~

In 2001 the machines I gamed on were rented by the hour and ran Counter-Strike. The two people who wrote Doom had gone off to make games for a Pocket PC.

John Romero and Tom Hall had come out of id Software and then out of Ion Storm, where Daikatana took five years and landed in 2000 to reviews that are still the shorthand for what happened to Romero's reputation. Stevie Case left Ion Storm in January 2001. Romero and Hall finished Anachronox and left that July. In August the three of them set up Monkeystone Games in Quinlan, Texas, joined by Lucas Davis from Ion Storm and by Brian Moon, who had been the chief financial officer at Ensemble Studios.

The point of it was to be small. Romero's own account is that the job at Ion Storm had turned into managing people rather than writing code, and Monkeystone was built so that would not happen again. The first game, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, started development in August 2001 and shipped on 23 December for Pocket PC, then went to Windows with Mac and Linux after it. A Game Boy Advance version was finished and never released. A second in-house title, the puzzle game Congo Cube, came in 2003 and was ported down to Java ME and BREW handsets. Alongside that the studio published other people's small games: Bust'em, Argentum, Rocket Elite, Baseball Mogul 2003.

In August 2003 THQ Wireless hired them to put Red Faction on Nokia's N-Gage, and they finished it that October. That is the one Monkeystone product with any chance of having reached me, because Nokia was the phone everybody in Turkey had and the N-Gage was the Nokia you were allowed to laugh at. A Pocket PC in 2001 was a thing I had read about.

~ the case file ~

~ why they left ~

Romero has given the reason for leaving his own company in interviews more than once, and it is a personal one. The relationship with Case ended in the spring of 2003, described afterward as the worst experience of his life, and what followed was a wish to get out of Texas entirely. Hall decided to go with his business partner. Both left in October 2003 and both were hired at Midway Games in the same month, leaving Davis running Monkeystone on his own.

~ the last contract ~

A Chronicles of Riddick game for the N-Gage was in progress and was cancelled. After that the studio moved to Austin to help Midway Studios Austin with the multiplayer code for Area 51, work that let Romero and Hall pay off Monkeystone's business loan in full. Area 51 shipped in 2005, and the studio closed. When the two of them left Midway afterward they each took half of Monkeystone's remaining staff with them.

The month is not settled. The company's own pages and the biographies built off them say January 2005; Romero's telling puts the closure after Area 51 was out, which was April. Both accounts agree on the year and on the shape of it, which is that Monkeystone was finished the moment the people who wanted it to exist stopped wanting that.

~ the window it sat in ~

Between about 2001 and 2004 making games for phones meant shipping a different build for every handset, through a carrier deck that decided what anybody would ever see. Studios from that era are mostly not remembered at all, and Monkeystone is remembered only because of who was inside it. Four years of Pocket PC puzzlers reads strangely in the biography of the man who designed E1M1. It is the one stretch of that biography where he says the work was writing code.

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