With the recent poor showing at ATEI, and the many rumours that have circulated this year, Midwaygames on Friday let go many of their key arcade staff. Whilst MTN and Infinity will still remain, its seems no further development with occur in coinop.
Whilst we are still waiting for an official statement, it seems that 30 people were let go from Midwaygames including Carlos Laguardia & Viginia Pina. This should come as no surprise as the ATEI Trade Show in England a few months ago reveiled a company in poor state. Midway showed The Grid (one year old product), Arctic Thunder and the Infinity touchscreen system. It was clear after visiting the booth and talking with staff, that the company as a group had moved away from coinop and into gaming and consumer products.
For the past year, operators have been voicing their concerns about Midwaygames losing touch with customers - many cannot afford dedicated machines or game boards that cost over $4000usd. It was also true that the writing was on the wall when the company decided to release NFL Blitz 2001 to the home market, totally bypassing the coinop industry.
Last year also saw the closing of Midways other assets - Atari Games & Williams Pinball. The closures saw companies with proud histories come to an end. Only a few years ago, distributors would be fighting to have these names included in their portfolios.
So what actually happened on Friday and what does it all mean?
Matt Leone from
Eventgaming has summarised the situation very well after talking with Midway staff;
"Last Friday saw an end of an era for Midway's arcade games division. The company has made a huge shift to now focus completely on console games. One Midway employee, who wants to remain anonymous, told us the following:
"Yup. A sad day indeed. All future games will be consumer (heavy development on PS2 has been happening for about 12 months) based. Only 1 game got cancelled. It was a gun game that wouldn't cross over that easily to a consumer joystick. Other than that, no other games have been cancelled. Just repositioned to consumer. We do have a lot of cool games in development though. About 16 internal games with 20 man teams."
Another employee of Midway, who also wished to remain anonymous, told us that "all the efforts are going toward touchmaster and MTN!" By "touchmaster," the employee is referring to Midway's Touchmaster Infinity line of touch screen machines. This product will continue for the time being.
Two of the more interesting titles that are now seemingly headed to home systems are SanFrancisco Rush: Hot Rod and Mortal Kombat 5. Both games are big sequels for the company and should do well on systems such as PlayStation 2 (neither title is confirmed for PS2 at this point)."
We are further saddened by the present news, having been saddened last year losing many friends at Atari and Williams. There are however new rumours that software developed by Midway may come back to arcade, but not using Midway hardware.
