Is there some Lovecraft family curse that says any project inspired by his works with a budget of more than $200 will never get off the ground? The evidence is starting to mount up since, according to a report sent out by the studio Monday, THQ has unceremoniously cancelled Guillermo Del Toro’s planned Insane trilogy of games.
Nobody should be surprised though. Not only have we not heard anything about the game in about two years, since the first teaser trailer came out, but THQ is in pretty dire straits at the moment, with developers under the company’s umbrella closing up shop, leadership changing hands, and a bleak stock forecast. Insane wasn’t even the only victim this week, since THQ also unloaded Tomonobu Itagaki’s Devil’s Third. At least all that game needs is a publisher.
The company’s pretty much shifted all its focus to going where the money is. Namely, the upcoming sequel to Darksiders, the WWE games, and Saint’s Row. And that’s probably the issue, since Guillermo was working with Volition on Insane, and with Saint’s Row 4 slated for next year, and Volition not being Rockstar, with multiple studios working on multiple “smaller” titles at once while cranking out a GTA or Red Dead Redemption, no way do they have the manpower to give Guillermo’s vision the TLC it needs.
The good news is that all rights to the game reverted back to Guillermo, which means he’s free to shop the game around again. And that may be kind of a godsend. Like everything else in that man’s brain, Guillermo had ambitions out the ass for Insane, and ambitious is not a word one usually applies to THQ. Only question now is who would we apply that label to who’d be willing to pick up the ball on this?