38 Studios founder and former Red Sox star Curt Schilling said he was “tapped out” of cash in his first interview since the studio’s demise. In a sympathetic radio interview on WEEI (via Boston Globe) this morning, Schilling said he told his family last month, “The money I saved and earned playing baseball was probably all gone … Life is going to be different.”
Documents released after the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (liquidation) show that the studio owed $150 million to more than 1,000 entities, most of that debt to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp., and that the developer had less than $22 million in assets. Rhode Island taxpayers will now have to spend approximately $12 million annually until 2020 to repay the 38 Studios debt to bondholders.
“The employees got blindsided,” Schilling said. “They have every right to be upset. I always told everybody if something were going to happen, you’re going to have a month or two of lead time, and I bombed on that one in epic fashion.”
Schilling also confirmed they were on the verge of signing a $35 million deal for a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the company’s RPG project by Big Huge Games, but talks collapsed once RI Gov. Lincoln Chafee made statements about the studio’s precarious financial situation. He also said Reckoning didn’t bring in revenue to the studio because it still had to repay an advance to publisher Electronic Arts.
Schilling says he’s ‘tapped out’ in first interview since 38 Studios collapse originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 22 Jun 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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