14 DAY TRIAL // Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick has recently talked about last year's scandal between his company and Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions, over Brutal Legend, a game that started developing with Vivendi's help, which was latter acquired by Activision Blizzard, but was eventually published by EA.
For those who forgot, back in 2009, famous game designer Tim Schafer was gearing up to release Brutal Legend, a game endorsed by Hollywood celebrity Jack Black, which seemed that it will be the next big thing.
The development of the game was pretty troubled though, as it was set to be published by Vivendi at the beginning, but was dropped by the company when the merger of Activision and Blizzard happened.
After Double Fine made a new deal with EA through its special EA Partners program, Activision Blizzard took Tim Schafer's company to court, calling for damages and retributions.
The lawsuit was eventually settled, but Schafer went on to attack Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick on multiple occasions.
Now, Kotick offers his own insight into that scandal, saying that he had very little to do with the whole thing, and that his company only wanted to get back the money Vivendi invested in the project.
"I don't know him. I never met him," Kotick said of Schafer. "I had no involvement in Vivendi's decision to go into business with him. I had very limited knowledge of what we were even doing with him. The guy went off and signed a deal with Electronic Arts for millions of dollars and owed Vivendi money."
"Vivendi had advanced him like $15 or $20 million dollars," he said. "He missed all the milestones, missed all the deadlines, as Tim has a reputation of doing. I don't know if it was a decision not to publish it. I don't even really know where we were in the negotiation and discussions about what was going to happen to the product. Unbeknownst to everybody, they didn't have the rights to sell."
"So all we'd said is, 'Look: If you go and do a deal with somebody else, pay back the money that was advanced to you.' That was all we were looking for. We ultimately got a fraction of the money that had been advanced to him, and as far as I know, that was the end of it. But I don't even know if there was a lawsuit from my recollection," he continued.
Brutal Legend went on to be published by EA after the lawsuit was settled, but even though it received lots of positive reviews, sales weren't that good, prompting Double Fine to cancel the work on a sequel.