Game Developer Magazine evidently wasn’t able to edit one of their recent features in time, and wound up proclaiming that Big Huge Games was one of the top 30 video game developers in the world just last week. It was a bittersweet coda to the 38 Studios/Big Huge Games debacle, to see the now-defunct studio awarded accolades that it quite obviously deserved, but was no longer around to bask in.

I did a big post-mortem on both studios last week, and Gamasutra turned in their own analysis of the whole mess on the first of the month. Their reportage on the downfall of Curt Schilling’s kingdom is actually quite a worthy (and lengthy) read, and seems — fortunately — to at least partly exonerate Schilling of some of the more grievous wrong-doing that some had previously suspected him of. Like the incredible terse email with which both studios were unceremoniously ended:

Bill Thomas, president and COO was the author of the infamously-terse 11th-hour layoffs email.

Actually, Schilling is mostly praised in the article, which draws on comments from former 38 Studios and Big Huge Games developers (anonymously, of course):

Although Schilling is being portrayed in the media as a sports star who tossed money at his dream project without thought of how to succeed, employees don’t agree with this view, describing a kind and enthusiastic patron whom they believe did much to try to make things work out.

“We never would have survived to make Reckoning if he hadn’t bought us,” says a Big Huge Games source. He describes Schilling’s “kindest, most generous” intent in the early days of the MMO, and says Schilling “went to lavish personal expense” for his teams, buying customized jerseys and other morale perks.

“But in the end, his optimism turned out to be naivete, and it slowly killed us,” the source continues.

Employees never had warning when the company was going to miss its payroll because apparently Schilling had been all but certain another investor was coming through, up to the last minute. Employees say they later learned that on two occasions the threat of being unable to make payroll had been alleviated by savior investors, so on that third occasion, Schilling had just been counting on something to manifest — and that didn’t happen in time.

“Even so, for the next seven days, he insisted that they were just about to get a new investor who would solve everything, and we hoped and slowly collapsed,” the employee continues. He even says he’s worried about Schilling’s well-being and how he’s taking the failure of 38 Studios.

“At the end, he stopped talking to us at all — which is a shame, because he honestly loved the setting and both teams, because they were personal dreams of his… He was a naive sucker, and I think his VPs played him, but he always had the kindest intents for everyone, and was never malicious or manipulative. He deserves that much to be known.”

“I know this scandal has been painting Curt as a hypocritical idiot, but he is absolutely one of the good guys,” another source at 38 Studios agrees. “[Schilling] often said that if there is anything he or the company can do to help in times of crisis or need, that he would be there, and until this mess, he was always able to back that up.

Schilling has evidently taken the downfall of the studios very hard; one report (which I can no longer find a link for) mentioned that he’d dropped something like 40 pounds in the span of not even a week.

And in many respects, the characterization of him as naive seems the most apt. Gamasutra’s report explains how a combination of internal machinations amongst various top-level managers and “C-level”-types, coupled with what seems more and more like an orchestrated attempt on the part of Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee to badmouth the studio and Schilling at every turn, ultimately undid the former Major League pitcher’s dream, cost over 400 people their jobs, and brought to an end not only one of the more promising fantasy RPG franchises to come along in recent years, but also a damn fine-looking MMORPG that might just have done its own little bit to bring some much-needed change to that increasingly stale field.

However, some truly remarkable news emerged from Baltimore and North Carolina this week. Baltimore, of course, was the home city of Big Huge Games…and Cary, North Carolina, is the home of none other than Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine.

Epic, you see, had a bit of a dream:

On Wednesday, the ex-BHG leadership team contacted us. They wanted to start a new company and keep together some of the key talent displaced by the layoff, and hoped that they could use an Epic IP as a starting point for a new game. We loved that they all wanted to keep working together, but it was pretty clear they’d have trouble building a demo and securing funding before their personal savings ran out.

In one of life’s coincidences, Epic’s directors had spent the morning discussing how we’d love to build even more successful projects with our growing team, but that we’d need a dramatic infusion of top talent to do so. Which, we all knew, was impossible.

So now we’re planning to start an impossible studio in Baltimore.

It’ll take a while to find space, set up desks and PCs, purchase sufficient Nerf weaponry and Dr. Pepper, etc. But some of these folks have been going too long without a paycheck to wait for that. So, as soon as we can, we’re going to try to get people working down here at Epic headquarters in Cary, NC as contractors.

There’s a million things to work out. How many of the team can we hire? What will it be called? What will they be working on? We don’t know all the answers yet. Please give us some time to figure it out; we hope to have more to share soon.

As I noted in my Examiner column, this is an exciting prospect indeed. The Big Huge Games team, brought on board as a new Epic Games studio, to (apparently) work on a new action RPG backed up by Epic’s admittedly very powerful technology base?

Consider me interested.

The First Age of Update: 38 Studios filed for bankruptcy today. Governor Chafee, for his part, has vowed that Rhode Island’s taxpayers will get as much money back as he can possibly squeeze out of the smouldering ruins of the studio. Which might only be around $20 million, mind you, if one analyst is to be believed.