Troika closes

Following nearly two months of rumors that it was in trouble, Troika Games has apparently closed its doors for good. In an e-mail sent out this morning to numerous sites (including GameSpot), joint-CEO and founder Leon Boyarsky finally gave the announcement he had promised would come before the end of the month.

"As many of you may have already heard, Troika has laid off all of its employees and is closing its doors due to our inability to secure funding for future projects," read the e-mail. The e-mail continued on a grateful note. "We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years. It has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company." The e-mail then concluded by further thanking Troika's now-scattered employees.

Though Boyarsky was the sender of the e-mail, it was cosigned by Tim Cain and Jason Anderson. The three designers were at the forefront of the creative team behind the now-legendary postapocalyptic role-playing game Fallout at the once-mighty developer-publisher Interplay (which, by many accounts, is on the verge of becoming defunct itself).

In 1998, Cain, Anderson, and Boyarsky broke away from Interplay before the release of Fallout 2 to form Troika, an independent, RPG-centric studio. Ironically, the company only produced a trio of games: 2001's fantasy title Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura; 2003's adaptation of the classic Dungeons and Dragon module, The Temple of Elemental Evil; and 2004's first-person shooter/RPG hybrid, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Unfortunately, none of Troika's games were successful enough to keep the studio financially afloat. It had briefly developed a postapocalyptic role-playing game that it eventually pitched to Interplay as a potential Fallout 3. However, when Bethesda Softworks acquired the Fallout license last year, the game was put on hold.

Though fatalistic in tone, Boyarsky's e-mail would not rule out the possibility of a resurrected Troika in the future. "We have not yet made the decision as to whether Troika Games as an entity will regroup and pursue future projects or simply cease to exist," it read. As for Troika's employees, a recent forum post by Bloodlines lead programmer Andrew Meggs said many had joined other developers, including Day One Studios, Mythic Entertainment, Point of View, Swingin' Ape, Turtle Rock, Treyarch, and another studio created by Interplay castaways, Obsidian Entertainment.