V1 Interactive, the independent developer behind the 2020 video game Disintegration, announced on Monday that it’s shutting down.
V1, based in Redmond, Wash., had been working on Disintegration since 2015, and released it last year through the New York-based publisher Private Division. Around 30 employees are affected by the closure.
“At V1, our priority has been to the wellbeing of our employees,” studio head Marcus Lehto wrote on Twitter. “We’ve been transparent with them about the state of things for months and are making this decision now so they still have ample time to search for new jobs while being supported by our studio.”
We are sad to inform you that V1 Interactive is officially closing.
We want to thank all the talented people at V1, both past and present, who helped make the last 5 years wonderful.
And a heartfelt thanks to the amazing community that supported us. pic.twitter.com/XX6Sxtc32o— V1 Interactive (@V1Interactive) March 8, 2021
Lehto, a DigiPen student mentor, was the art director for the first three games in the Halo series and the creative director for 2010’s Halo: Reach. (In the original Halo, Lehto’s initials can be found as an Easter egg on the sole of the Master Chief’s boot.) Another Halo veteran, Lee R. Wilson, joined V1’s core team as a narrative and cinematics director in 2016.
Disintegration (not to be confused with the Cure album or Tori Amos song) made a number of high-profile convention appearances throughout 2019, including that year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.
In the game, society has fallen apart thanks to resource depletion and climate change. Many surviving humans have chosen to “integrate,” transferring their brains into robotic bodies, in order to minimize their environmental impact. When the superpower Rayonne begins forcing unintegrated humans to undergo the integration process, a group of rebels takes up arms against them.
The hook for Disintegration is that it’s a combination of a first-person shooter and a real-time strategy game. The player, as outlaw leader Romer Shoal, is in command of a four-person squad, so you can simultaneously issue them commands and provide them with air support from the back of your flying grav-cycle. It’s an undeniably ambitious game, particularly for a small, independent studio.
Unfortunately for Disintegration, it came out in June 2020, to mixed reviews and minimal advertising, three days before the debut of Sony’s hotly-anticipated The Last of Us Part II. It may have ended up with the single worst launch window of the year.
Three months later, V1 announced that “the game unfortunately struggled to build a significant audience,” and in an unusual move, began to remove Disintegration‘s in-game store and multiplayer modes. The game’s single-player campaign remains for sale on digital storefronts.
