Brash's release slate, what happens to those games now

(This is the third of eight or so posts going up throughout the holiday weekend tied to an article I have in the forthcoming weekly Variety that looks at the promise of Brash Entertainment, the first Hollywood videogame publisher, and the reasons it went from $400 million to out-of-business in a year and a half. The article and posts are all based on extensive interviews with nearly a dozen former employees, executives and developers who worked at or with Brash, most of whom understandably spoke only on background. The posts here on the Cut Scene will summarize and expand some of the key points from the Variety article and also provide some interesting details and anecdotes that didn't make print.

You can read the entire article here.

You can see all of my related posts, and get all the important background, on the Cut Scene's Brash category page.)

Brash managed to release three games in its short existence. They all objectively sucked, to put it bluntly. I'll say that flat out because even the people who worked at Brash agreed. It's one of the reasons there was such low employee morale.

"The thesis of the company was that no game would have less than 15 months of development time," says Jonathan Eubanks, Brash's senior executive producer who departed over the summer and has since started his own company, Invicta, told me. "Senior executives had every intention of making that happen, but there were a host of problems. In the end, our games were not quality offerings and everyone in the company knew that to be the case before they went out."

"Alvin and the Chipmunks" actually sold a decent 360,000 units domestically, according to NPD, though it still lost money. "Jumper" and "Space Chimps" sold a miserable 60,000 and 59,000, respectively, and most certainly lost money.

Besides the fact that their first three games sucked, there's one other thing about which everyone who worked at or with Brash agreed: the titles in development for this holiday season, next year, and 2010 were better. Maybe not all pure genius, but probably destined to restore Brash's reputation as a company that doesn't just make sh*tty games.

Here's a list of them all (or all the ones I found out about anyway) in rough order of when they would have been released (though I'm pretty vague on all the ones after Saw), along with the developer in the cases where I know who that was. Links are to the movies/TV shows on which they were based, when appropriate:

-Six Flags Fun Park (7 Studios)

-The Tale of Despereaux (Sensory Sweep; Fizz Factor)

-Prison Break (Zootfly)

-A Night at the Museum 2

-Where the Wild Things Are

-Saw (Zombie Studios)

-9 (7 Studios)

-Clash of the Titans (GameRepublic)

-Superman (Factor 5)

-300 (GameRepublic)

-The Flash (BottleRocket -- thanks for the tips, readers!)

-Cowboys and Aliens

-Wall Street (an original MMO; more on that soon)

So what happens to them all? I hear that Six Flags Fun Park, for which the DS version was (barely) released by Brash but the Wii version wasn't, is being sold to another publisher and will come out soon.

As for the rest, they're largely back in the hands of their licensors. The studios could the sell in-development game to another publisher to complete and release. In some cases I hear the studios are considering funding development and publishing themselves. In others, especially the further out games that are early in production, they might just be killed.

Warner Bros., it should be noted, has the biggest load to carry, with six properties it owns or co-owns now back in its hands. Though it at least has an established in-house publisher (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) to help sort things out.

On the one hand, its a major pain for these studios. On the other, they probably get to keep the multi-million dollar advances they were paid for the licenses since Brash breached its contracts. So they did get something for, essentially, nothing.

All in all, though, I'm thinking that the studios that were cautious about Brash and never worked with it, like Paramount, Sony Pictures and Disney, are feeling pretty good rightt now.