First there was a bang. The noise that comes from steel-on-steel impact. An unfamiliar sound in an office used to the peaceful clatter of mechanical keyboards. Then came the second bang. A third. A fourth.
People began to take notice. One ear at a time, the headphones peeled off. Hordes of men and women, peering over office dividers like confused meerkats. What was that noise? Where was it coming from?
Then it became clear. A full-grown game designer, enraged. He’d picked up the nearest blunt instrument, an umbrella, and began rhythmically battering it on a filing cabinet.
For Charles Henden, who witnessed the incident, this wasn’t out of the ordinary. This was game development.
“You know, we’ve all been there,” says Henden. “We’ve all beaten up a filing cabinet with an umbrella at some point in our careers.”
Henden, like everyone else watching, was a game developer, working at the now defunct THQ Studio Australia in Brisbane. In high-pressure environments like this, with incredibly tight deadlines and huge financial stakes, meltdowns were almost common.
“I could probably, from each of the projects that I worked on, give you a story that would just blow your mind,” says Rex Dickson, who also worked at the studio around that time.
But in a universe where crushing work hours are normalized and outrageous behavior is commonplace, this time the stakes were higher than usual. This was no normal project. No normal video game.
The year was 2011. The THQ Studio Australia team had a reputation for creating licensed video games within tight time frames. This time it had landed a big one. In 2012, Marvel and Disney were set to release the first Avengers movie, launching a franchise that would change cinema forever. Avengers would ultimately become bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Harry Potter, bigger than anything. This was a huge deal, and everyone on the team knew it. They worked as though their careers and livelihoods depended on it.
But despite being an innovative, high-quality video game that wowed almost everyone who played it, the Avengers project would never see the light of day. Everyone working on the game would ultimately lose their jobs.
A global financial crisis, a surging Australian dollar, a licensing deal that all but guaranteed it would never return a profit: The Avengers was a video game caught at the center of a dozen competing hurricanes.
And despite the best efforts of everyone involved, it was ultimately torn apart.
Execute crisply
“So what’s this Avengers thing?”
After being told he was working on an Avengers video game during a Christmas meeting in 2009, that was Charles Henden’s first question.
In the cold light of 2020 the question seems quaint, but in 2009 the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as we now understand it, didn’t really exist. Iron Man had hit cinemas, but Marvel hadn’t yet sold the public on the broader concept of the MCU. Henden understood a video game based on an Avengers license could be big. But how big? The scale was unclear.
Robert Rodriguez/CNET
Dailey knew he had the support of THQ on the publishing side and, in time, the development team would firmly get behind the move to first-person. But if Marvel didn’t support the decision, none of that would matter.
“It was really Marvel that worried me.”
Dailey and the bigwigs at THQ Studio Australia invited Marvel out to Brisbane to sell them on the idea of a first-person Avengers game, cobbling together a presentation that included an early prototype of what the team was hoping to achieve with this bold new vision.
“It really took them by surprise,” remembers Dailey. “But in a good way.”
“They were like, ‘This is great, this is different. It’s unlike anything we’ve done before.’ And once we got Marvel they were a huge ally.”
Marvel and Disney didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Despite early reservations regarding the move to first-person, everyone I spoke to agreed: There was a point at which the entire team came together on the Avengers project and went full speed ahead as a cohesive unit.
Robert Rodriguez/CNET
Following him was Lance Powell, an art director. He’d worked with Dickson on tough projects in the past. “We made a pact to go together and bring stability to the IP,” says Powell.
Initially the new arrivals clashed with a very Australian Avengers team. “I’m sure people felt like their toes were being stepped on,” says Dickson. “We were the Americans.”
Henden remembers butting heads with the new arrivals.
“These new guys come in and they’re wearing Yankees caps in Brisbane,” says Henden. “One guy was jacked, wearing these tight V-necks. He had like a liter bottle of rum on his desk, and was always like, ‘Bro you wanna drink? Let’s do shots and do overtime!'”
But “The Americans” believed overtime would be necessary, particularly if Avengers was to hit shelves in time for the movie release in 2011. THQ Studio Australia, Powell estimated, had a year’s worth of work to do in six months.
“That’s a difficult pill to swallow if you live by a 38-hour workweek,” he remembers.” But everyone knew what was at stake.”
Dickson says things never got to the stage where they were “hitting it hard.” But there were casualties.
As a result of the way certain pipelines had been established, one designer ultimately became solely responsible for a sizable part of production. It was this heightened level of pressure and stress that resulted in him beating up a filing cabinet with an umbrella.
“He’d have meetings with team leads, and they’d say, ‘You’re not pulling your weight’, but they didn’t understand how much stress he was under,” explains Henden.
Things escalated. In addition to his gigantic workload, the designer was also a high-level World of Warcraft player. As production ramped up, Henden remembers him mentioning he was scaling his WoW time back — to 70 hours a week. To him, a 70-hour World of Warcraft week was “casual”.
One day it all became too much to handle. He imploded.
Most remember hearing a loud bang, but the first thing Henden heard was a shout. He saw one producer, in a defensive stance, looking like he was about to disarm someone.
“Mate, just put the knife down, OK? It’s gonna be alright mate, just put the knife down.”
The designer — the high-level WoW player — had gone into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife he could find and had been stabbing it rhythmically into his desk. Allegedly, one woman asked if he was OK, and in response he’d swiped the knife toward her. Thankfully, no one was injured.
“Just put the knife down. We’ll go outside and figure this out.”
The producer confronting the designer was an ex-bar bouncer, he had experience dealing with situations like this. He wasn’t able to convince the designer to put down the knife, but managed to escort him outside, away from the rest of the team at THQ Studio Australia. Soon afterward, the police arrived.
“We had no idea he could become so unhinged,” says Henden.
THQ got the designer help, paying for counseling and treatment, but he lost his job for that outburst. Later, Henden remembers, he attempted to come back to work as if nothing had ever happened.
“He really did rock up, press the doorbell and say, ‘Hey I’m back, ready to work’.”
The legacy deal
“I didn’t make that deal.”
Danny Bilson already knew that video games based on movie licenses were on the decline. He’d seen as much at EA, where he’d worked on licenses like Harry Potter. He loved the Avengers game, but he didn’t like the deal.
“There was a massive guarantee against that game,” explains Bilson. “You had to pay Marvel double-digit millions no matter what.”