Schilling Should've Practiced What He Preached

The best and only good news to come out of the collapse this week of former Red Sox star Curt Schilling’s 38 STUDIOS LLC video game company is the fact that most of the approximately 400 laid-off employees won’t be out of work long.

Despite he and his business managers obviously not demonstrating real-world experience re: the expenses and pitfalls of starting such a massive undertaking in the risky video game field, Schilling was savvy enough to hire mostly top-flight technical people and designers both for the only game they wound up releasing, KINGDOMS OF AMALUR: RECKONING and the planning-stage project COPERNICUS that will probably never see the light of day, at least through 38 STUDIOS.

Most of them have started receiving feelers from dozens of similar game corporations and are already job interviewing, just days after the layoff. Ironically, many of the New England companies that are rapidly contacting Schilling’s castoffs are located in Massachusetts, as opposed to Maryland and badly-snookered Rhode Island, 38 STUDIOS’ two bases where the 400 layoffs occurred.

Cambridge’s DEMIURGE STUDIOS and Quincy’s IRRATIONAL GAMES, as well as video behemoth ZYNGA, all with strong needs for experienced gaming engineers and artists, are swooping in to thankfully save the day for these blameless and competent technicians.

And Massachusetts’ government, from Deval Patrick on down, deserve hearty congratulations for not falling for Schilling’s $75 million-loan siren song two years ago, paving the way for RI’s then-governor Donald Carcieri to swallow the bait. Common sense factors that went into the Bay State’s decision at the time included the fact that Schilling, despite his intense interest and affinity for gaming, had never developed nor sold an actual game yet, as well as the ridiculous asking price.

Massachusetts, like New Hampshire and the rest of the nation, had just pulled itself out of the Great Recession and was prioritizing job creation, as opposed to taking an exorbitant chance on an unproven product. And apparently selling 1.2 million units of AMALUR at $40 a pop wasn’t enough to allow the 38 STUDIOS to break even on the game’s production costs, nor to fund the 2013 release of COPERNICUS (supposedly needing another $100 million to finance). So what were Carcieri and the RI Economic Development Corporation thinking?

The bottom line is good luck to new Ocean State governor Lincoln Chafee who is stuck with his predecessor’s mess (interesting correlation between this story and 3 ½ years ago when president Barack Obama took Schilling hero George W. Bush’s ugly handoff. Hopefully Chafee can navigate as well as Obama has). And the serendipity of the gaming industry being one that has such a crying need for talented people is great for all those former employees going forward.

But the former Red Sox pitcher maybe should have followed his own continuous stream of conservative sloganeering during his playing career, which encompassed the usual bromides of "personal responsibility", "smaller government", and "end state corporate welfare", beliefs that were certainly not in evidence as he first attempted to hold up Massachusetts for funding while later succeeding in Rhode Island. Apparently to Schilling, like to 99 percent of other self-described "strict Constitutionalists," there’s no such thing as acceptable government entitlement spending unless THEY’RE getting the handout.

Also there’s the possibility that Bush feels he owes Curt a favor after he spent 2004 traveling the country campaigning for him (including here in New Hampshire, utilizing his Red Sox/World Series ties), while at the same time castigating opponents of Bush’s then-ongoing Iraq War. Maybe a phone call to Texas is in order.

But his continuing if understandable silence over the past week after being for years one of New England’s most quotable athlete bloviators on all conservative topics speaks volumes. One can only hope that a Rhode Island default on the $75 million bond-issue loan will be OKed by their legislature, saving the state’s taxpayers from becoming victims of Schilling’s own use of "state corporate welfare."