Pandemic Studios

Tony Albrecht, founder and Director of Overbyte and veteran programmer with past stints at studios such as Ratbag, Midway, and Pandemic, has written a fantastic entry for AltDevBlogADay detailing his unusual journey into games development.

Ex-Pandemic Studios Brisbane employees who have fond memories of their old work place may be disheartened to learn that their old studio is in the process of being demolished.

The writing was on the wall when EA signalled staff cuts from various studios just last week, with "substantial" staff lay-offs from various studios including Pandemic Studios (L.A).

AustralianGamer has the trailer for the canned Pandemic Brisbane game, The Next Big Thing. Pandemic Brisbane had two teams working on two equally big titles. One was the Batman movie licensed game which has since been greatly talked about, and the other was the previously unknown Wii title called The Next Big Thing.

Tony Albrecht has contributed his story of redundancy to Kotaku in an article which contains a few life changing stories of game developers that have been let go of their job in this time of economic downturn. The ex-Rat Bag and ex-Pandemic senior programmer describes how he was well prepared for it this time round and how he was able to bounce right back up after losing his job at Pandemic...

I'm a bit late with this one but those crafty guys at Kotaku have been snooping on Pandemic staff and their personal blogs to suss out some Dark Knight media, and it looks like they have scored some success.

Michael Pryor, 3D environment artist at Pandemic Studios Brisbane, had some really great looking screen shots of what we can safely assume are from the Dark Knight game. It probably hasn't helped that Michael has pulled down those shots from his blog, but Kotaku saved some smaller versions of it and hosted it on their site. It looks absolutely outstanding.

Reports have come in confirming that the remaining employees at Pandemic Studios Brisbane have been let go after losing their bid in getting publisher interest for their Wii game called "The Next Big Thing" in the hope of finishing its development.

As we wait for some confirmation on the current state of Pandemic Studios Brisbane, ex-Pandemic programmer, Tony Albrecht has written about how the redundancy has affected him on a personal level. While he was much better prepared for it this time, Tony describes some of the difficulties and life changing realities that a redundancy in the current game industry climate brings.

From his Seven Degrees of Freedom bog..

Although the team that developed Destroy All Humans! 2 may not be around any more at Pandemic Brisbane, that hasn't stopped AI programmer, John Krajewski, from writing a feature at Gamasutra on the data-driven AI architecture developed for Pandemic Studios' open world game, Destroy All Humans! 2.