A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I was one of the 500 laid off when Activision cancelled the "Hero" business unit in February 2011. What's rarely ever talked about is that the studio where I worked was working on what was to come after Warriors of Rock, and had had a glowing executive review just 1 month prior.

Hope Larry can catch you for an interview; as a fan of the genre, I'd love to hear whatever details you could disclose on the matter

I've gone into greater detail on my own TL a few months ago, but to try to sum up in as few self-replies as possible: - Hired at VV in late 2007 for the Wii GH port team, as a coder. - Partway through Warriors of Rock, we're told all three SKUs of the next ver. are on us.

- WoR ships, part of the team focuses on Skylanders 3DS, more senior folks focus on "Phoenix". - Game focus is on a "play the music video" vibe, which was re-used later in GH: Live when ATVI decided to revive the shambolic corpse of the "Hero" business unit and give it to FSG

- Full pro-guitar setup (cf. RB3) decided too complex; best-of-both-worlds input instead - sixth button, plus six-string module in the guitar body. - Executive review in January 2011; excitement all around, execs say they're extending release date by a year for extra polish.

- Majority of internal QA dep't laid off shortly thereafter, citing reduced immediate need for QA. - Q4 FY2010 earnings call in early February; day-of, e-mail goes out to all hands at VV to announce an all-hands meeting an hour prior to the call

- Turns out ATVI are shuttering the entire "Hero" unit instead, laying off 1/3rd staff at VV, closing RedOctane. Resulting layoff totals about 500 heads.

Lots more details than just that, such as the design director at VV (Adrian Earle, a wonderful, kind-hearted man) having to sit there and handle laying off his subordinates, then getting laid off himself. But yeah. That's about how it went.