In local news, Precursor Games, the small outfit composed of former Silicon Knights members, including Denis Dyack, is shutting down and putting development of Shadow of the Eternals “on hold.” The announcement came on the official Precursor Games forum on Friday morning. The game, which was an unofficial sequel to the original, critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness for Nintendo’s GameCube, was originally placed on Kickstarter to imitate the happy-ending-funding-stories of other unofficial sequels, such as Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 Megaman-esque sequel, and Chris Robert’s phenomenally successful Star Citizen which is a Wing Commander/Star Lancer follow up.
Shadow of the Eternals has had a troubled history, with rumors circulating that its early development at Silicon Knights was the cause for the distracted, slap dash production of X-Men: Destiny, the failure of which was the final, financial nail in the coffin for the St. Catherines-based studio. Denis Dyack and a small core team then went on to form Precursor Games and attempted to appeal directly to fans by putting the game up on popular crowd funding website Kickstarter. The funding attempt failed, twice, with the initial $1.35 million for the first Kickstarter effort reduced to $750, 000 and still not meeting goals.
Officially the game has not been cancelled. In the same post, by Denis Dyack, he writes:
Is the project dead? No, but we feel it needs a rest too. We have all agreed as a group that when and if the time is right we will get together and start it up again.
This is a real shame, as the original Eternal Darkness was something of a minor cult hit among horror aficionados. Unfortunately, Denis Dyack’s notorious reputation (he’s one of the few developers to actually get banned from prominent gaming forum NEOGaf for antagonizing posters) has created a lot of tension in the gaming community. It’s created a conflict in the gaming community between a desire for a sequel crashing head on with a dislike and/or distrust of Dyack. Precursor Games, prior to shut down, was based in Hamilton, Ontario.
