“have a TINY glass of coke or get WHIPPED!” says Santa

Happy holidays everyone!  Figured I’d keep things going with another story this month. This one’s about how gloriously the artists’ naivety can be taken advantage of in the cut throat world of business. also thought it would be nice to pepper it with some sweet seasonally appropriate Haddon Sundblom paintings.

It was early 2005. Our little studio was young, going full force, and times were good. Things were starting to gel and we didn’t all hate one another yet. We’d secured a large contract that enabled us to hire on actual full time staff. Looking back, it all seemed so simple then, and we really thought we had it all figured out lol.

I had recently left my full time studio job, and my old boss reached out and wanted to put us in touch with the studio art director for the publisher who owned them. It was a big publisher, but without naming names, we’ll call them “snacktivision”. He indicated there was some interest in engaging with our studio at the publisher level, which could kick open a ton of potential work for us. Outsourcing was the hot buzzword of the moment as “next gen” games had reached a level of complexity that extra hands were required to develop them.

“QUICKLY! we must fill Santa’s belly refrigerator with sweet brown liquid”

Next thing you know we’re going down to Santa Monica and sitting in these meetings at long tables with gray haired folks who seemed invested in the idea that we could be the solution to their looming manpower problems.

Things were moving fast. Several studios under the snactivision umbrella were excited to work with us, the head art director was all in and seemed cool enough. We began to engage with a certain well known studio that was working on a game that seemed like it would be a lot of fun and a good fit for the team.

The big ask on this project was that in addition to doing the concept art, we were to build cinematics team, who would create all of the in game cut scenes and stuff.

We had some folks who came from motion pictures, and they were very excited to get this pipeline set up.

We ramped up quickly, and built a cinematics team of various vfx folks who had worked on some big shows.

We negotiated this arrangement where they would pay us a large monthly retainer and we would keep a stable of artists at the ready, available to help on anything needed. It was around 300k a month, which, for a small studio who had started with zero seed funding, It was like, a lot of money at the time.

Now…this is where we thought we were being smart. For everyone’s sakes (ours) we had it written into the agreement that if either party endeavored to end said contract, there was a 90 day period where things would keep going (the money) so we could properly wind down and complete any outstanding work. They agreed that this was a reasonable stipulation.

We were so stoked! we had this huge new client who had promised us enough work to fund significant growth, AND we had this buffer built in that would save our asses if we fucked up and lost the gig. HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY LOSE???

“SANTA! this isn’t even your house, what are you doing?!!”

Things started to come apart little by little. The cinematic efforts were stumbling. While it was a team of talented folks, they had no experience working together, and were hamstrung by a lack of leadership. Results coming in weren’t  pretty.

I remember feeling a little nervous, but coming from games and not film, I trusted the process, and maintained hope that it would “come together in post”…or something.

Around this same time, one of our concept artists had created a magazine cover for this same game. Upon its release, we were accused by rival publisher of reusing sketches we had previously created for them.

This of course wasn’t true, it was simply a case where both of the main characters had been art directed by the respective clients to have similar facial features. Big square jaw, squinty eyes, cool floppy hair…main character canonical features. And even though one was a space pilot and one was a cowboy, it put us in the tough position of having to defend our artist and explain our case as best we could. It didn’t seem world ending, but It was just another stupid bump in the road that we didn’t need.

The cinematic was still not coming together and it was sparking concerns not just internally but also with the client.

Then one week, the check didn’t show up.

EXPOSED! Santa is a military psy-op

We contacted them, and kindly let them know that the payment hadn’t arrived.

“We’re canceling the contract” they said.

“Well, that’s unfortunate, but if you’ll remember, we have it written into the contract that we are to be paid for 90 days past the termination of the agreement” We said.

“Riiiight…about that. Sue us.” They Said.

Lol. Check mate. Even if they were in the wrong, it’s not like we could afford a lengthy lawsuit with a publisher who has a TEAM of full time lawyers on staff, ready to litigate things like this for YEARS if needed.

Sure, in a just world you could find some sharp witted kind hearted lawyer who takes on the case pro bono, and the whole thing gets settled out before the next bimonthly pay period. But that did not prove to be my experience.

What we had to do was lay off a bunch of folks. And as a young inexperienced group, we didn’t lay off enough people, and it sent us on a pretty dangerous spiral that took at least a year to get past. In some ways, it left damage that the studio was never able to fully recover from.

In the end there were some hard but also valuable lessons learned.

-In business, there’s what’s right and wrong, but generally the prevailing party is the one with more time and resources.

-And when the lawyers for the other team quickly agree to your terms, it means they’ve likely figured out a way around them.

Hope you all have a happy holidays whatever you celebrate, and all my best to you in 2025.

“so you say he was about 5’10, 250 lbs, wearing a red suit with white trim,a belly that shook like a bowl full of jelly, and he was just sitting there in your easy chair with his shoes off?”