pandemic-studios posts

We really do feel for the Pandemic Studios team members who lost their jobs last week thanks to EA's latest cost cutting move. It's not right that the studio that has made so many great games is basically no more. But geeze....what did that copier ever do to you?

Yeah, yeah . . . we know that the YouTube movie that we can see above this post is supposed to be a "homage" to Office Space, complete with the same gangsta rap music (which by the way is definitely NSFW). But the copier doesn't seem to be the thing to attack in this case. How about a nice EA logo bashing? Or maybe some other object directly linked to the studio shut down? Beating a copier to death just seems so . . . cliche. However the movie is still funny and we guess that, in the end, that's what matters.

[Via Kotaku]

Pandemic Studios' life as a separate game development studio came to a swift end earlier this week with the reveal that its owner Electronic Arts was shutting down their Santa Monica-based offices and laying off 200 of its workers. While EA has said the Pandemic brand name and its franchises will live on, the last game to come from their original offices will be the WWII action title The Saboteur.

Late on Friday, the dev studio's community manager posted on their message boards that " . . . . The Saboteur has officially gone "GOLD" on all 3 planned platforms (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 & PC)." The game is still scheduled for a December 8 release date here in the US (Europeans get the game a few days earlier on December 4). As the community manager admits, "This has been a very difficult week for Pandemic Studios, but does not change the fact that a team of amazing people worked very hard to make The Saboteur a great game that fans will be able to enjoy this holiday season." We are hoping the last game from their studio is good as well even if EA seems intent on not giving it a big marketing push.

[Via Joystiq]

Electronic Arts' current restructuring, announced during their financial results last week, is going to cause the shutdown of Pandemic Studios. Gamasutra reports they have gotten a hold of an internal EA memo with the details. Under their plan, the founders of Pandemic (Josh Resnick, Andrew Goldman and Greg Borrud) will leave EA with 200 other Pandemic team members. The remainder of the Pandemic team will be moving to EA's Los Angeles studios. The Pandemic brand name will apparently continue and new games based on previous Pandemic franchises are in the works.

Pandemic, centered in Santa Monica, California, was formed in 1998 and started out as a PC only game developer, working on games like Dark Reign II and Battlezone II for Activision. In 2000 they opened an office in Australia. Over the years they created a ton of titles including Mercenaries and its sequel, Full Spectrum Warrior, the first two Star Wars Battlefront games and more. In 2005 Pandemic merged with BioWare to form one big independent game developer. In 2007 BioWare-Pandemic was bought by EA for over $600 million. Pandemic's last game as a separate studio will be The Saboteur due for release on December 8.

With rumors that Pandemic Studios might be one of the facilities shut down by Electronic Arts as part of their cost savings program, Pandemic's upcoming open world WWII game The Saboteur might turn out to be the final game from the developer that brought us Star Wars Battlefront 1 and II, Mercenaries 1 and II and more.. The PC version of The Saboteur is currently due for release on December 8 and now the game's official message board have revealed the minimal and recommended system specs for the game.

As you will see after the jump, the system specs, particularly for the recommended system. are a bit on the beefy side. We will soon seen if the game lived up to its promise in early December.

It's looking like The Saboteur could be the last major PC game release of 2009 (assuming no further delays) and the game's publisher Electronic Arts wants to give folks who pre-order the WWII action game a leg up on the title's virtual Nazis. If you put your money down on the game at GameStop you will get what's pictured above.

Now don't go running to Mom that GameStop is selling knives to its customers. This is an extra in-game weapon that you will get access to in the Pandemic Studios-developed title. Yes by pre-ordering the game you will be able to use the knife to handle a "silent and swift execution maneuver" upon the Nazis who are holding Paris during the war.

Electronic Arts may not be making Dante's Inferno for the PC but another multiplatform game is getting a PC port and as of today a release date. The publisher announced that The Saboteur, developed by Pandemic Studios, will be released for the PC and other platforms on December 8.

Once again, if you happen to be heading to the San Diego Comic-Con this week you will be able to play the game at EA's booth. There's also a panel for The Saboteur that will be held on Saturday at the show. The WWII open world action game, set in Nazi-occupied Paris, will likely be one of the last major game releases of 2009.

Today's announcement of id Software's acquisition by ZeniMax Media (owner of Bethesda Softworks) took most people by surprise. Yet it's not the only time that a big independent game developer has been bought out by a publisher. Sometime the new relationship works out for both companies and sometimes it doesn't.

Big Download decided to look back at just some of the major acquisitions between PC game developers and publishers and see how they fared. Which ones bore fruit? Which ones failed to live to their potential? And which one resulted in the developer shutting down operations even after a successful run of major PC game hits?

Click on the image above to continue reading about the big PC game developer acquisitions.

While Replay Games and Southpeak get ready to release their WWII stealth action game Velvet Assassin next week, the long-in-development WWII title The Saboteur is still several months away from completion. This week its publisher Electronic Arts released some new screenshots from the game that sometimes show off some non-stealthy (and bloody) shooting

The new shots from developer Pandemic Studios give a sense of the game's open world setting of Nazi-occupied Paris. As the character Sean Devlin, you have to be able to both sneak around Paris and fulfill missions. The game itself shifts from black-and-white to color as more and more of Paris is liberated. At the moment there's no set release date for the game.

It's been a long, long time since any news has come out about Pandemic's WWII stealth action game Saboteur. The game was first revealed via an Game Informer print magazine article in 2007 but since then info about the title has been hard to come by. The game was under development before Pandemic's purchase by EA in early 2008 and ever since then.

This week Pandemic has finally launched a full web site for the game and also revealed that the title has changed slightly. Instead of just "Saboteur" they have added a "The" before it. Hmm.. Anyway, The Saboteur's web site has some new screenshots and a little more info about the open world action game set in Nazi occupied Paris. Pandemic and EA plan to release the game sometime before March 31, 2010.

It's the weekend so we feel free to post up an article that is squarely in the rumor category. Once again this info comes from semi-reliable site Videogaming247.com who claims that their unnamed but supposedly reliable inside source claims the Star Wars: Battlefront game series is heading back to developer Pandemic, who created the first two games in the multiplayer oriented series for LucasArts in 2004 and 2005 before being bought by Electronic Arts.

While never officially announced by any of the parties involved, it's all but out there on the net that UK based Free Radical Design was set to make Star Wars: Battlefront III but for reasons that are still unclear they lost the rights to make that game. With Pandemic now owned by EA that means if the Battlefront franchise really does head back to Pandemic it will make the second such Star Wars game to be under development at an EA owned studio (BioWare is of course working on the MMO title Star Wars: The Old Republic).