Electronic Arts shuts down Mythic Entertainment studio

Electronic Arts has shut down its Mythic Entertainment game studio, which created the Warhammer Online and Dungeon Keeper mobile game and helped pioneer online games with The Dark Age of Camelot.

Kotaku, which first reported the shutdown, said that an EA representative confirmed the closure with the statement: “We are closing the EA Mythic location in Fairfax, Va., as we concentrate mobile development in our other studio locations. We are working with all impacted employees to provide assistance in finding new opportunities, either within EA or with other companies via an upcoming job fair.”

Mark Jacobs and Rob Denton founded 1995. They created the massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game The Dark Age of Camelot. They tried to create other online MMOs, such as Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. But they pretty much lost the war with Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft in the subscription MMO market. Warhammer Online shut down last year.

Jacobs left some time ago, and EA is now shutting the main location in Fairfax. Mythic recently tried making mobile versions of EA’s famous game properties, such as Dungeon Keeper, and Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. Peter Molyneux, the original creator of Dungeon Keeper, slammed the EA free-to-play remake as a lame attempt to squeeze money out of gamers by forcing them wait forever to make progress.

EA bought Mythic in 2006. It rebranded it as BioWare Mythic, and it then changed the name back to Mythic in 2012.

 

 

 

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.