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RIP ‘Dead Space’ Dev Visceral Games
Sad news for those fans of Dead Space and Dante’s Inferno, as EA has decided to close down Visceral Games. The reasoning for the closure is due to the nature of Visceral’s current project, a single-player Star Wars game, and the view based on “fundamental shifts in the marketplace” that require EA to “pivot the design”. That game will now be headed up by EA Vancouver.
Visceral Games started out as EA’s Redwood Shores studio. The studio changed its name to Visceral Games in 2009 following the release of Dead Space in 2008. Their catalog of games ranges from the previously mentioned Dead Space series and Dante’s Inferno, to licensed games based on films like The Godfather and Lord Of The Rings. Recently, the company spent time working on DLC for Battlefield and the spin-off Battlefield Hardline.
Obviously, anyone who’s been around the industry knows that this happens on occasion, and EA is no stranger to situations like these. Studios like Maxis, Bullfrog, Pandemic, Origin and Westwood have all been laid to rest under EA’s watch, mostly due to poor performance of those studios’ games. And after the lukewarm reception to Dead Space 3, and the franchise’s subsequent hibernation, it seemed like it was only a matter of time.
— Visceral Games (@VisceralGames) October 17, 2017
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All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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