Friday, June 13, 2008

While the local gaming space rises, Cecropia falls

By Christopher Calnan

After spending more than five years of work, Lexington-based game creator Omar Khudari plans to officially shut down game software developer Cecropia Inc. in September.

Khudari said he is shuttering Cecropia, a self-funded company that launched an animated game called The Act in 2006. The company, which tested a coin-operated version of the game last year, planned to subsequently create a home version depending on negotiations with publishers. But interest in the game, which was created with the help of 40 former animators from the Walt Disney Animation Studios in Orlando, Fla., didn’t materialize after Khudari pitched the game to at least 18 publishers. So nine months ago, he decided to begin shutting down operations.

The closing coincides with an unusually active period for the game industry — especially locally — which added to the heartache, said Khudari, a former co-founder of Papyrus Design Group Inc. “It is extremely hard and very disappointing,” Khudari said. “I was encouraged by the industry getting broader and mainstream.”

Other New England game companies have been active over the past couple of years.

In April, Rockstar Games, publisher of the controversial game series Grand Theft Auto, purchased Andover-based Mad Doc Software, creating Rockstar New England. Rockstar is a division of New York City-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., which in 2006 purchased through its 2K Games unit Quincy-based Irrational Games Inc., the developer of hit game Bioshock.

That same month, Jeffrey Anderson, the former CEO of Westwood-based game company Turbine Inc., attracted $5 million in funding to start a Foxborough-based company called Play Hard Sports Inc., which plans to distribute casual sports games over the Internet starting in the fall.

In 2006, Harmonix Music Systems Inc. in Cambridge was acquired for $175 million by MTV Networks, and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling founded Green Monster Games LLC, now called 38 Studios LLC, in the old DEC building in Maynard to develop a massively multiplayer online role playing game with Spawn comic book creator Todd McFarlane and the Bay State’s own heroic fantasy literateur R.A. Salvatore.

Khudari declined to disclose how much he invested in Cecropia, which had been funded from the profits he had garnered from selling Papyrus in 1995 for $40 million to game publisher and developer Sierra On-line Inc., a division of Vivendi Universal Games International. Khudari has yet to decide what to do with Cecropia’s intellectual property.

In retrospect, he said, it may have been more prudent to build several prototypes that could have been delivered on the Internet using Flash software. That approach would have enabled users to select a preference before Cecropia developed a full-scale, costlier product, Khudari said.

“We could have spent less money,” he said, “and possibly gotten more commercial appeal.”