Following Microsoft’s mass layoffs earlier this year, a group of former ZeniMax developers have formed a worker-owned studio dubbed Sackbird. Made up of folks who worked on The Elder Scrolls Online and a cancelled MMO codenamed Blackbird, the studio have confirmed they’re working on an unnamed original game that’ll hit PC and consoles.
Zenimax’s Blackbird project was one of numerous games cancelled as Microsoft laid of around 9,000 staff in July, with the ZeniMax Online Studios United union left fighting for the jobs of members affected. Bloomberg subsequently reported that Blackbird was a sci-fi noir-ish third-person shooter with looty bits and lots of vertical movement.
That brings us to the formation of Sackbird Studios, who’ve already won this year’s award for most wonderfully tongue-in-cheek branding. The “independent, employee-owned game studio that is self-funded for multiple years” have adopted a roaming avian armed with a sack of belongings as their logo, and have a website which invites folks to “seek the sack” or “drop a sack” as a means of getting in touch.
Given how badly beaten most folks in and around the games industry are with the layoff truncheon at this point, it’s lovely to see Sackbird having fun with what’s happened. They’re also very up front about using it to inform their new approach to game-making. “After years in AAA, we wanted the freedom to take smart risks without waiting for a greenlight or chasing quarterly targets,” Sackbird COO David Worley, an ex-ZeniMax principal tools engineer, said. “We’re fully employee-owned and funded, which means we only answer to people who are passionate about games.”
“We’re grateful for our time at ZeniMax Online Studios; it shaped us as developers and as people,” Sackbird’s CEO Lee Ridout, a long-time director of ecommerce for The Elder Scrolls Online, added. “When I learned that Blackbird was being cancelled and a lot of people were losing their jobs, it lit a fire. We realized the best way to protect our craft—and our team—was to create a studio where creative independence isn’t negotiable.”
Sackbird are currently made up of a “tight, senior team” of fewer than ten devs, and have confirmed that they’re actively developing a currently unannounced “original project for PC and consoles”. They plan to share more info about this first game when they’re ready.
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