Silicon Knights

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

~ the goodbye ~

Denis Dyack and Michael Mays started Silicon Knights in St. Catharines, Ontario in July 1992, which is a small city on the wrong side of Niagara Falls from anywhere the games industry was. The first few years were strategy games for DOS and the Amiga. Then Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain landed on the PlayStation in 1996, published by Crystal Dynamics, and the studio's name started to mean something to people who read credits.

In 2000 Nintendo signed it to build exclusively for Nintendo hardware and took a stake in the company. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem came out on the GameCube in 2002 as the first game Nintendo ever published with an M rating, and it is the reason anybody still says the studio's name. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes followed in 2004, a Konami game remade in Ontario under Nintendo's roof. That was the year the exclusivity ended.

What came after was long and did not go well. Too Human had been announced in 1999 for the original PlayStation and shipped in 2008 on the Xbox 360, nine years and two platform changes later, to reviews the studio spent months arguing with in public. X-Men: Destiny arrived in 2011 and was received worse. By then the lawsuit was four years old and it had become the main thing the company was doing.

The Nintendo decade is the part I can only read about. In 2002 I was eighteen and the machine in the room was a PC, which is what most of the people I knew had, because a console in Turkey carried an import price and the games for it could not be upgraded one piece at a time. Eternal Darkness needed a GameCube. What kept my attention here was the other half of the story, because a fight over who owns which lines of an engine is a thing I understand from the working side.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the nintendo years ~

Eternal Darkness worked on the player rather than the character. When the sanity meter dropped the game would fake a volume change, or pretend the television had switched itself off, or show a blue screen, or claim it was deleting your save. None of it touched anything real. Nintendo took out a patent on the mechanic, which is a large part of why two decades of horror games have gestured at it and nothing has properly done it again.

It sold modestly and reviewed extremely well, and it remains the only thing in the catalog that is remembered without an argument attached. The Twin Snakes was competent work on somebody else's game. Nothing after 2004 had a publisher who was invested in the studio surviving.

~ the lawsuit ~

On 19 July 2007 Silicon Knights sued Epic Games, claiming Unreal Engine 3 had been licensed on a description Epic never delivered, and that Epic had held back the working version to finish Gears of War with it. Epic countersued the following month, arguing that Silicon Knights had taken its code, built a private engine out of it, and shipped that.

The jury found for Epic on every count on 30 May 2012 and awarded 4.45 million dollars. With attorneys' fees and prejudgment interest the total passed nine million by November. Silicon Knights had 97 employees in July 2011. By October 2012 it had five.

~ the order ~

On 7 November 2012 the court ordered the engine-derived code destroyed, along with the unsold retail copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny and three projects that had never been announced. Too Human came off Xbox Live shortly afterward and nobody at Microsoft explained why at the time. Dyack had already left in 2012 to start Precursor Games, whose crowdfunding for a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness failed twice. The company filed for bankruptcy on 16 May 2014, four months after losing its appeal.

~ the long tail ~

In June 2019 Microsoft put Too Human on the Xbox store for nothing, made it backward compatible, and left it there. So the game a federal court ordered pulped is now the easiest object in this whole story to obtain, and the studio that made it is the part that is actually gone. Eternal Darkness is still stuck on a 2002 Nintendo disc, because the rights sit with a company that has never shown any interest in moving it.

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