Smith and Midway part following BlackSite's 'f*cked up' development

Blacksite and Kane & Lynch... I hope they don't fuck up Deus Ex.

Good Luck! I hope that Eidos isn't just Midway and Ion Storm Duct-tapped together.

What a surprise.

Nice to see people like Smith damaging the companies he works for. Maybe development on Deus Ex 3 will be just as fucked up and he can rant some more.

Well you know what happens to honest people in this industry don't we boys and girls? That's right, be a sniveling little arse-kisser and you'll go far! It's the American way!

Now he'll have more time to talk politics in interviews...
Why again does anyone care about the political views of a guy making video games? Oh, that's right, they don't. Maybe he can SFTU...

Thats the spirit. Stick it to the man!

I was at Harvey Smith's presentation at the Montreal International Games Summit, and I think what he said was blown out of proportions. His presentation wasn't "why Blacksite sucks", it was something entirely ("The Imago Effect" for those curious) and he spent 10 minutes at the start doing a short post-mortem of Blacksite. Sure he was harsh on the project, but honestly almost everyone in the games industry has been on projects that went worse than that.

Another presentation at the MIGS, a post-mortem of Crackdown, felt harsher honestly. The producer there described parts of the project as "The Gates of Hell" and such -- I didn't come out of that presentation with a warm fuzzy feeling about Microsoft as a publisher...

Smith's post-mortem was awfully close to the game's release though. Add to this that he said how much he loved Montreal at the start of his presentation and how he'd spent a lot of time thinking about what he'd do with Deus Ex 3 -- that adds credence to the idea he did this either because he knew he was leaving Midway or because he wanted to get fired, and he's going to work on Deus Ex 3. Frankly I hope he does work on that game -- no matter what you think of his work, I prefer to have someone who've seen the good and bad parts of working on a Deus Ex project than someone who's entirely new at it.

I can see where Midway is coming from in firing him. Maybe the development was fucked up, maybe it wasn't. What it wasn't is cheap to make and his comments have effectively killed any sales that the game might have made this holiday season. Is that a bad thing? Personally, I'd say no. Charging people 60 dollars for ALPHA software is disgusting, but that doesn't mean that the employees of the studio have a right to come out and sandbag their company.

Imagine an employee in any other sector doing this. Imagine if a Microsoft employee came out and said that Vista sucks, and that the development of it was fucked up. Would he still be around on Monday? I don't think so.

Note to Stéphane d'Astous : if you absolutely want to hire a Smith for Deux Ex 3, please make it RANDY Smith, not Harvey "Deux Ex 2" Smith.

Is it just me that thinks this game isn't that bad?

Alexander is a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.