Tony Scott was attached to Midway's canceled Career Criminal game

Last week Midway canceled a game at its Austin studio called "Career Criminal" that interim CEO Matt Booty described as "a large, ambitious open-world project." The publisher laid off 90 people working on the game after determining that, as Booty said in an e-mail to employees posted by Kotaku, "The resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile... were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success."

But there's more about "Career Criminal" that we didn't know and which I just learned today. As many gamers know, Midway has had a tendency recently of attaching Hollywood talent to its in a producer/creative consultant/guru sort of role. Look at John Woo and "Stranglehold" or Vin Diesel and the upcoming "Wheelman."

Tony Scott, who directed everything from "Top Gun" to "True Romance" to "Enemy of the State" and "Deja Vu," had a similar role for "Career Criminal." Midway, of course, never talked about this (and still has no comment when I asked a spokesperson) because it never officially announced the project.

Given Scott's record of making stylish action movies, it might have been a pretty cool game. Then again, "Stranglehold" was a fairly unique, stylish action game that just wasn't very well designed underneath its nifty Woo-esque cinematic veneer. We'll never know whether "Career Criminal" would have had the same problems or finally managed to successfully combine a filmmaker's signature style with high quality gameplay.