In a recent interview with Boston sports radio network WEEI on the collapse of 38 Studios. Below is a collection of some of the his musings from the interview.
* "I put everything in my name in this company. I believed in it. I believed in what we had built. I never took a penny from this company. I never took a penny in salary, I never took a penny for anything. It was different. What we built was so incredibly different from a company perspective. And what we had, it was amazing. I think it was a dream place to work."
* "If you remember, after Governor Chafee went into office, he came by the studio, he had made a public comment that he was against the deal before he got elected but now that he was in the office he was going to everything he could do to help this company succeed. And that absolutely unequivocally never ever happened in any possible way. That's not the sole reason this company failed. It's not. And again, I'll keep repeating it: I'm responsible for absolutely a part of this. It's just, it's crushing and devastating to have seen it fall and fail exactly the way it did after five years of building this."
* "I had put at that point about $30 million of my own money into the company, and we were looking for investment. When [Rhode Island] approached us and talked about this deal, obviously it was incredibly attractive, because we would have the state as a partner - we initially thought we would have them as a partner. This is one of the private venture hubs of the works - Boston, New England area and California. Initially, that looked like it would be a huge boon, because we would have them in our corner, working with us and for us. And it just never ever materialized."
* "Obviously, it's been a challenging couple of months, and I couldn't imagine this. But I'm not asking for sympathy. That was my choice. I chose to do this. I wanted to build this. I wanted to create the jobs and create something that had a very longstanding world-changing effect. We were close. We were close to getting there. It just fell apart."
* "The employees got blindsided. One of the many, many mistakes I think that was made - or that I made, or that we made as a leadership team - was that this came out of nowhere for them. In all honesty, they found out because Gov. Chafee made a comment on Monday night about 7 o'clock, a public comment - which neither side had ever publicly commented on anything we were doing - and it was based around keeping the company, he used the word 'solvent.' That word, it was an enormous problem immediate for us. But the employees had no idea. Payday was the next day, and they didn't get a paycheck. And it just went downhill from there...The employees got blindsided. They didn't deserve it. It was not how we ever did business. The employees were everything. That was what the company was and it was about... I always told everybody, if something were going to happen you're going to have a month or two lead time. And I bombed on that one in epic fashion."
Since the collapse, the former 38 Studios employees have found saving grace at the hands of Epic games. As for Schilling? He's now facing a lawsuit from Citizen's Bank.