38 Studios, the failed game studio that baseball star Curt Schilling created, is the nightmare and cautionary game industry tale that just won’t die. The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged two of the parties involved with securities fraud about the amount of money needed to properly fund the now-defunct company.
Curt Schilling
Schilling’s studio received funding from the state of Rhode Island to relocate its studio and finish a huge massively multiplayer online game that would have challenged Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, but the company ran out of money and became one of the worst examples of government-industry collaboration in the game industry’s history in the U.S.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. 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.
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