Curt Schilling's Kingdoms of Amalur company cleared of criminal charges
It's a victory but it's no home run yet.
After an extensive investigation, 38 Studios - the company founded by former baseball star Curt Schilling, that made Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - has been cleared of criminal charges.
38 Studios went under in May 2012, unable to pay back the money the American state had loaned it, hence the furore.
A sizeable investigation was launched thereafter to find out whether any laws had been broken along the way, and... there wasn't strong enough evidence to conclude they had.
That doesn't mean 38 Studios is off the hook; the company still faces a civil litigation that will look deeply into the entire case and figure out what, or whom, was to blame.
As the Rhode Island State Police statement, reported by WPRI, declared:
And then:
Kingdoms of Amalur was released in February 2012, and at the time, 38 Studios was on the precipice. It needed the game to perform, to sell 3m copies - but it didn't. It sold 1.22m copies in 90 days, which isn't bad at all, but financially, as Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee said at the time, "The game failed. The game failed."
Pity, because Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was a good game - not a brave one, perhaps, but solid, well made. "But it's not all elbow grease," said Oli in his Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning review, "Kingdoms of Amalur adds a splash of colour and a lick of polish to the open-world RPG, and they couldn't be more welcome."
Moreover, it's a pity because Kingdoms of Amalur was only ever really a precursor, an entrée, to a fully fledged online fantasy world codenamed Project Copernicus, which we've since seen screenshots and a intro trailer for. There was a Kingdoms of Amalur sequel in the works, too.
All things Kingdoms of Amalur went to auction following 38 Studios' collapse, including rights to the sequel and to Project Copernicus - but no-one bought them. Curt Schilling even auctioned off his personal baseball relic, the bloody sock.
What's Schilling up to now? In 2016, Schilling was dumped by ESPN after sharing something on Facebook considered anti-transgender. The media company said it was an "inclusive" one and that Schilling's conduct had been "unacceptable", according to CNN.