Stainless Steel Studios

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

~ the last words ~

Age of Empires was a game everybody around me could name. Empire Earth was the one its lead designer made next, and it never traveled the same way, at least not to where I was sitting. The studio behind it had eight years and two finished games, and then it went out in the quietest manner available to an American developer, which is to say nobody said anything at all.

Rick Goodman started Stainless Steel Studios in October 1997 with Dara-Lynn Pelechatz, who ran operations. The office was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the whole company was pointed at real-time strategy, which in 1997 was the genre with the most room left in it. Goodman had been the lead designer on Age of Empires at Ensemble Studios in Texas before he left to do this. The founding date is not firm: Wikipedia says October 1997 and the Gamasutra report that announced the closure says January 1998, and nothing reconciles them.

Empire Earth shipped in 2001 and was the studio's argument for existing: one campaign stretching from prehistory to the far future, which is a ridiculous span to balance and was the whole pitch. Empires: Dawn of the Modern World followed in 2003. The third game was Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War, built for Midway Games, with a ship date set for February 2006.

It never shipped on that date under that studio's name. On 25 November 2005 Simon Carless reported on Gamasutra that Stainless Steel had closed its doors and laid off the vast majority of its staff, with the official website already removed. The news came from a fan forum first. Nobody from Midway or from the studio had anything to say when asked.

~ the record ~

~ weeks from gold disk ~

The confirmation that the report rested on came from Daniel Higgins, who had been writing game AI there. "This is true, SSSI is no more," he posted. He said he could not give details as to why, and then gave the detail that stings: "the team was in high morale and plowing ahead at full steam, and we were just weeks from gold disk." A studio does not usually die at that point in a project. It dies six months earlier, when the publisher sees the build.

Midway finished Rise & Fall itself and released it on 12 June 2006, about four months late and with its developer gone. What surfaced afterward was that the closure came from cuts in funding by Midway, which was the studio's most important client. One contract held up a company of that size, and when the contract moved, nothing underneath it was left standing.

~ the shower head ~

The name came off an airplane. Pelechatz told GameSpy that Goodman, flying home from California, decided he would open the SkyMall catalog and name the company after the first item his finger landed on, and the item was a stainless steel shower head. The logo that went with it, drawn with Jam Design, was a silver ball with a salamander standing on top. For eight years a serious strategy studio in Massachusetts traded under the name of an in-flight shopping listing, and none of that is anywhere on the box.

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