What happened to Kingdoms of Amalur? The rise and fall of 38 Studios

To the rest of the world, the story of 38 Studios is an oft-forgotten blip. To those of us that live in Rhode Island, it’s a quiet ghost, the kind of thing you don’t think about until you’re walking downtown and remember that, for a time, one of the most ambitious fantasy worlds in gaming was being built just a few blocks away.

I was fresh out of college in the summer of 2011, living at my parents’ house in northern RI. I picked up Dragon Age 2 on a whim. But I was enticed by the demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that came with it.

I didn’t know much about Amalur going in — just that it had some big names attached to it and a vaguely familiar, high-fantasy look. Everybody locally loved Curt Schilling. He was the pitcher with the bloody sock who played a crucial role in breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” by winning the World Series for the Boston Red Sox in 2004. It had renowned fantasy author R. A. Salvatore writing the story and Spawn creator Todd MacFarlane as a designer. What could go wrong?

The demo opened with a hook that was hard to ignore: you start as a corpse, tossed onto a pile of bodies, only to be brought back to life by a mysterious experiment. So many high fantasy games start with a “chosen one” prophecy or tavern errands, but Amalur’s setup felt stranger, darker, and it made me curious about what it truly meant to defy fate and destiny.

Then there was the combat — such glorious combat. The first time I swung a weapon, it just clicked. Attacks flowed together in a way that felt more like an action game than a traditional RPG, with dodge rolls, quick weapon swaps, and abilities that actually had some weight behind them. Though action-forward RPGs are pretty commonplace today, it was fast, flashy, and satisfying in a way that stood out from other similar games of its time. Why weren’t more dense RPGs this action-forward? Years later, when I read Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, I learned that the studio had a “combat pit” design team whose primary job was to iterate on and refine how combat felt moment-to-moment. And that combat felt very, very good.

In the weeks that followed, I did some research and my mind was blown to learn that this was just a prelude to an entire MMORPG set in this world with the same combat system, tentatively titled Project Copernicus. I had played a lot of EverQuest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy 11 on PlayStation 2 and even a little bit of World of Warcraft on my very weak home PC. My biggest gripe with MMOs of that era was combat. So often you’d just enter attack mode and spend your time shuffling through ability menus to time your attacks and spells. Amalur did not feel like an underdog. It felt like the next big thing.

I didn’t bother to even see who was making the game. I was blissfully unaware that just a few miles to the southeast, 38 Studios was already well on its way to imploding.

In 2010, the state of Rhode Island made a $75 million bet to lure 38 Studios to Providence, backing the company with a loan guarantee in hopes of jumpstarting a new tech sector in the state capital. The pitch was simple: hundreds of high-paying jobs, a foothold in a fast-growing industry, and the chance for a small state to punch above its weight. For a while, it looked like it might actually work, especially since Schilling himself had invested roughly $50 million into the studio. The studio expanded quickly as developers moved their families to RI or neighboring states.

Reckoning received solid reviews and sold fairly well to the tune of almost 1.5 million copies, including 1.22 million in just 90 days, outperforming publisher EA’s optimistic predictions.

Three months after it was released, however, 38 Studios missed a crucial loan payment. As Polygon first reported at the time, the entire staff was laid off on May 24, 2012. In a press conference soon after, RI Governor Lincoln Chaffee said that Reckoning “failed,” adding that experts told him the game would have had to sell 3 million copies just to break even. Days later, 38 Studios filed for bankruptcy.

Rhode Island taxpayers were left on the hook for more than $100 million once interest was factored in, a staggering sum for the smallest state in the country. What was supposed to be a bold investment in the future instead became one of the most infamous economic development deals in the state’s history.

The fallout dragged on for years. The state sued Schilling and other company officials in 2014, alleging they had misled Rhode Island about the company’s finances. That lawsuit lingered for years before being settled in 2016. Curt Schilling earned $114 over the course of his 20-year career in baseball and later claimed to have invested — and lost — $50 million or more in 38 Studios.

In the summer of 2014, a local news station ran a story about Jeff Easley. At the time, he was the last 38 Studios employee who maintained the server on which the remnants of Project Copernicus was still running at a local data center. He died a little more than a year later, and at some point after that, Copernicus was shut down. THQ Nordic did acquire the rights to Amalur in 2016, eventually releasing a remake of Reckoning in September 2020 that was met with mixed reviews. It served as little more than a grim reminder that this dead franchise was pretty solid, but only in its original era.

That building in downtown Providence was left vacant and sad for a time. Then Roger Williams University leased the building starting June 2016. These days, they call it a “Providence Campus” and “Extension School” with administrative offices and classrooms. I sometimes wonder if anybody takes classes on game development there.