Part 3: Interlude

Let's talk about the developers of this game, Symtus.

You may have never heard of Symtus, because, well, they only produced two games. One was The Dark Half, the other was CyberGenic Ranger: Secret of the Seventh Planet. Now, both games sucked, but CRSOTSP was a thousand times worse then The Dark Half.



Yes, that is right. You play as a guy who shoots dead floating people with a gun that turns them into calzones. That is it, that is the gameplay. It sucked and everyone involved in it should have be killed. The game tanked so bad that it was almost impossible to sell.

After CRSOTSP was released, Symus realized that gameplay might be kind of an important factor in a game and with all the money they could grab they tried their last and final project with Capstone publishing. As you can see, this game sucked as well and no one bought it. Capstone Software was a video game subsidiary of Intracorp and operated from the late 1980's until 1996. Intracorp was also a video game company. Capstone Software went bankrupt in 1996 and closed its doors along with their parent company Intracorp.

Guess what happened to Symus?

The executive producer of the game, Leigh M. Rothschild had a short carrer in the world of games. He made such classic hits like Surf Ninjas, Waynes World, Homey D. Clown and this piece of shit. Not sure what happened to him after Capstone, but I kinda imagine him drinking him self to death at the bar telling people how he help made a sweet puzzle in surf ninjas that required you to insert a hotdog into a stick of dynamite while weeping softly against a picture of Roberta Williams.

The programmer (A single person!) Brent Smith was one of two on the team to go on to other projects worth a damn. During the development of The Dark Half you can see that Brent had zero to little experience in DOS games. As time went on and for some form of redemption, Brent eventually got to work on projects like Tropico and Railroad Tycoon II.

The other person was Bruce Turner who did some of the art on The Dark Half. He later worked on projects like Prototype 2 and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.


Everyone else just kinda vanished. I don't blame them.