Inside the Destruction of Curt Schillings' 38 Studios

Boston Magazine has a detailed great article on the failure of 38 Studios. For anybody who still thinks that Project Copernicus would have been a great game if only 38 Studios hadn't run out of money, I'd like to draw your attention to the following quote from Curt Schilling himself:

The ex-pitcher had a bigger concern. “The game wasn’t fun,” he says, unprompted, beside the softball field. “It was my biggest gripe for probably the past eight to 12 months.” Visually, Copernicus was stunning, but the actual things you could do in the game weren’t engaging enough. The combat aspects especially lagged. Schilling — who never wavered in his belief that the game would be great — says the MMO was improving, but after six years, it still wasn’t there. When Schilling walked around during lunch hour, he says, nobody was playing Copernicus’s internal demos. They were all on some other game.

Endless optimism only ever gets you so far, it can neither create a great game, nor make a $150 million project succeed on its own.