Well, all things told, 2023 wasn’t a golden year for the games industry. For all the potential future classics that have been released, there’s been untold heartbreak. An unprecedented amount, really. Whether you blame the economy and gamers with fewer coins to spare or point the finger at cynical corporate entities, the fact is layoffs and studio closures have been happening on a weekly basis. From massive billion-dollar publishers to smaller indie teams, there have been over 6,000 game industry professionals put out of work this year. And among these closures have been some long-running notable developers, such as Volition Inc which announced in August that the 30-year-old studio with more than 200 employees will be closed. That’s a blow that every generation of gamer can understand.
Volition was one of those developers that had proven itself in a number of genres, with some gamers remembering the team for its retro classics like Descent and , or more modern titles like or, perhaps most notable of all, open-world chaos simulator . But Volition never even began life as Volition. Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog had been working at Looking Glass Studios at the time, having first met one another at Sublogic where they were working on flight simulators. While at Looking Glass, they’d come up with an idea for an indoor flight simulator that would allow for a full six-degrees of movement around the environment, and the two of them would slowly work on this together.
