We’re Never Getting Another Studio Like Monolith Productions

Whenever a studio is forced to close, it feels like losing a piece of gaming history. Decades of hard work and expertise cast aside because a parent company didn’t know how to run things without wasting millions, cancelling projects, or making the best use of talent. In the modern landscape, this has become a common sight as developers that have been creating games for years are forced to close after only a single high-profile failure.

For the better part of a decade now, Monolith Productions has been a victim of this executive dysfunction. This week saw the studio close after over three decades of operation and years of work on a Wonder Woman project that has also been cancelled. It was shuttered alongside Player First Games of MultiVersus fame and Warner Bros. Games San Diego. The trio of studios now cease to exist because of greedy mistakes that could have been avoided with just an ounce of foresight. None of this situation is fair.

Monolith Made An Embarrassing Number Of Great Games

But the closure of Monolith isn’t just a justification to mourn, but an excuse to look back on the studio’s past work and how it innovated again and again within the first-person shooter space to create some of the greatest games the genre has ever seen. Then it managed to reinvent itself over and over before corporate interests brought it to its knees.

Founded in 1994, Monolith cut its teeth on an assortment of first-person shooters for MS DOS and Windows like Blood and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, with a number of other genres like strategy and dungeon crawling thrown in for good measure. In the late 1990s, Monolith was clearly trying to find its feet as a developer, putting out enough hits to stay afloat in an industry that was still open to experimentation. Then, in 2001, it released what became its biggest game to date: Alien Vs Predator 2.

I have fond memories of playing the gem on my dad’s PC back in the day, blown away by the fact it offered three individual campaigns that allowed you to play as Colonial Marines, Xenomorphs, and Predators. All of them have their own distinct movement style and clever gameplay mechanics that at the time felt entirely unique. It was bold, unexpected, and like little else at the time. And a big success, paving the way for work on games like Tron 2.0, The Matrix Online, and eventual creation of major franchises like Condemned and FEAR.

Condemned and FEAR Pushed The Shooter Genre Forward

While Condemned: Criminal Origins might not fly today on account of it pretty much being a Homeless People Bludgeoning Simulator, it’s still a brilliant game. This Xbox 360 launch title puts you in the shoes of Ethan Thomas, a detective accused of a crime he didn’t commit while on the hunt for an infamous serial killer. It was a psychological thriller eager to change what it meant to be a first-person shooter with a focus on subversive horror, melee combat, and a need to navigate dark environments.

It’s hard to believe after thinking back on Condemned that Monolith gave us FEAR in 2005 as well. First Encounter Assault Recon was yet another shooter with a focus on scares as you controlled a member of a squad hunting a haunted little girl capable of destroying the world. It was pretty generic in the grand scheme of things, but the way in which it let us activate bullet time at any moment to dart about environments and murder enemies with an assortment of weapons made it so much fun. It was a hit, spawning two sequels and a cult following that subsists to this day.

Monolith rode the FEAR train until the short-lived Gotham City Imposters and Guardians of Middle Earth, two multiplayer games that struggled to attract an audience. These failures ceased to matter when Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor launched in 2014, however. It didn’t care about Tolkien’s lore in the slightest, instead using The Lord of the Rings as a backdrop for an open world adventure all about exploring Mordor and murdering Orcs in the coolest of ways.

You could also argue it wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling with the Nemesis System underpinning everything. The gameplay mechanic had characters remember the player and experience of past battles as epic villains hunted you across entire playthroughs until you brought them down for good. It was incredible, a system that would return in the sequel three years later only for Warner Bros. to patent it and store it away in a vault for good. Monolith would then remain silent for four years, announce a Wonder Woman title in 2021, and the rest is history.

Monolith Deserved Better Than A Cancelled Game And An Early Grave

Who knows if we will ever find out exactly what went on behind closed doors for a game that should have been a slam dunk for Monolith to bring about its eventual demise. I bet it started life as an ill-advised live-service much like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and once it started to crash and burn, Warner Bros. and Monolith tried to pivot only to realise it was too late.

It’s a devastating lesson in the risks of chasing trends and relying on licenses. Major studios should be given the resources and trust to make great games like they used to, but time and time again it’s been made clear this just isn’t possible anywhere despite the fact it should be.

Monolith spent decades creating a laundry list of classic games that pushed this medium to new heights, and all it has to show for it is an early grave, cancelled project, and people who deserve so much better now without work. Something has to change, or we will keep losing creators that made video games what they are in the first place.

Action

Adventure

Open-World

Released

February 2, 2024

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Violence