Over the last few years, the video game industry has been put through meat grinders, with tens of thousands of layoffs and dozens of studios, both big and small, shutting down forever. The latest casualty in a long line is Monolith Productions, the studio likely best known for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Monolith is a studio with decades of rich history, and was shut down this week alongside Player First Games and WB San Diego. While the layoffs alone are debilitating enough, what makes this specific instance even more egregious, is the absolute disdain it seems like WB has for the history of the studios it owns. It’s a stark reminder that when studios like Monolith get shut down, we’re losing a lot more than just the game they were working on — because those at the top simply don’t care.
Monolith Productions is one of those prolific studios, where its influence on the industry as a whole simply can’t be understated. It helped define the immersive sim genre with 2000’s The Operative. In 2005 it completely redefined the horror genre with two cult classic games, F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins - pushing forward both enemy AI and how the genre handles tone. Then in 2014 Shadow of Mordor released, giving us one the most truly innovative features gaming has ever seen with the Nemesis System, giving you a hierarchy of enemies that would grow and change alongside the player. That’s not even to mention the over a dozen games released in between all that.
