News
Activision Cleans Up By Saying Goodbye To Guitar Hero Among Others
In case you live under a rock and haven’t yet heard the extra large news surrounding Activision, they decided to trim the hell out of their hedges. Cheesy analogy I know, but I can only assume there have been many more flying around the internet in relation to this news. Activision is getting smart, and decided to completely stop production on many of their once incredibly profitable games.
Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, True Crime, and Tony Hawk will not be seeing the light of day again. While it does suck to see a game like Guitar Hero, which made way for the infinitely better Rock Band go under, it’s good they are ending it now. Rather than waste millions making games that aren’t performing Activision decided to pull the plug. Past the break for more. Tony Hawk. I’m really sad to see it go. I used to spend hours and hours playing the earlier Tony Hawk games with friends. They just kept taking the games way too far and they became more and more over the top crazy. They should have kept them simple. I remember the days when the original came out and you couldn’t even do manuals. Then in the more recent games you could tear ass through grass like you were on a motor scooter and do a pogo into a handstand like it was going out of style. Too much.
Activision really has no reason to keep those games running when they have HUGE games like Call Of Duty and World Of Warcraft. Sadly with the end of these games, 500 plus jobs will also be lost.
Even more sad, for Adam Dodd, super huge Diablo III supporter, reports say it’s not in their projected games list for 2011. Keep your fingers crossed for 2012.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but it was a cheerful illustrator from England who helped to define the terrifying war-torn imagery that inspired what we now know as Grimdark (a hybrid genre combining horror with sci-fi/fantasy).
Unfortunately for fans of Warhammer 40,000, Trench Crusade and countless other sources of Grimdark thrills, veteran artist John Blanche passed away this week after struggling with health issues for the past few years.
While the artist retired back in 2023, he leaves us with an enormous legacy of iconic artwork that continues to inspire gamers and storytellers around the world to this very day.
The news is especially gloomy as it was only last year that Daniel Lowman and Napoleon Dynamite himself Jon Heder released The Grim & the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary following Heder’s exploration of the Grimdark genre culminating in a heartwarming encounter with Blanche in his own home.
Below is one of my favorite pieces by Blanche, his highly influential depiction of Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne.
We send our deepest condolences to John Blanche’s family, friends, and fans.
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