Warner Bros.Over the last few years, the video game industry has been put through meat grinders, with tens of thousands of layoffs and dozens of studios, both big and small, shutting down forever. The latest casualty in a long line is Monolith Productions, the studio likely best known for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Monolith is a studio with decades of rich history, and was shut down this week alongside Player First Games and WB San Diego. While the layoffs alone are debilitating enough, what makes this specific instance even more egregious, is the absolute disdain it seems like WB has for the history of the studios it owns. It’s a stark reminder that when studios like Monolith get shut down, we’re losing a lot more than just the game they were working on — because those at the top simply don’t care. Monolith Productions is one of those prolific studios, where its influence on the industry as a whole simply can’t be understated. It helped define the immersive sim genre with 2000’s The Operative. In 2005 it completely redefined the horror genre with two cult classic games, F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins - pushing forward both enemy AI and how the genre handles tone. Then in 2014 Shadow of Mordor released, giving us one the most truly innovative features gaming has ever seen with the Nemesis System, giving you a hierarchy of enemies that would grow and change alongside the player. That’s not even to mention the over a dozen games released in between all that. F.E.A.R. remains one of the most innovative horror games out there, but has become increasingly more difficult to play as hardware ages | Warner Bros. Interactive EntertainmentThe point being, Monolith was just what its name inferred, a true monolith of the industry inexplicably tied to the history of video games. Seeing all that wiped away like it’s nothing is disheartening, especially considering how WB has gone about it. Alongside shutting down Monolith, the studio’s website has been taken completely online. That website served as the best chronology of Monolith’s work, with a detailed timeline walking through every game and development. Now it’s inaccessible. Then there’s the actual language used in the studio closures. An official statement put out by WB reads “We recognize Monolith’s storied history of delivering epic fan experiences.” That single line boils down Monolith's phenomenal history and influence into sounding like they churned out nothing but pop culture franchises. It’s a gross underselling of that influence, that raises major questions about how WB might have mishandled things — especially in light of what we know about the troubled development of Suicide Squad. But it’s not entirely surprising considering the very same statement says these cuts were around “buildings the best games possible with our key franchises — Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC, and Game of Thrones.” Suicide Squad was a tremendous failure for WB, costing the company a $200 million loss. | Warner Bros. Interactive EntertainmentIt should be abundantly clear at this point that WB cares more about the monetary value of its IP, than the actual talent at its studios — and doing anything meaningful with said talent. Suicide Squad was bungled with a forced live service model, despite being made by a studio that heavily specialized in complex single-player experiences. WB also has a patent on the Nemesis System until 2036 and has yet to do absolutely anything with it since Shadow of War, and likely never will considering the people who created it don’t have a job anymore. Then there’s a complete lack of interest in preserving or doing anything with the catalog of these studios. Games like FEAR and Condemned languish in obscurity with no way to be played on modern hardware, no kind of remaster, or anything to speak of. And those games will only become more obscure with things like Monolith’s website going offline. The silver lining here is that Gog.com announced FEAR is going to be part of its Preservation Platform, which seeks to keep influential classic games alive and playable for modern audiences. The release of FEAR on the platform has been pushed up due to the studio’s closure. The company has also said it’s working to keep some of Monolith’s other titles preserved. The Nemesis System is a truly innovative piece of design that’s never been used outside of the Middle-Earth games. | Warner Bros. Interactive EntertainmentBut in an ideal world, these kinds of efforts are something we wouldn’t even need to think about. Art, especially influential art, created by studios like Monolith would have a valuable place in the way we chronicle history. But there’s no centralized meaningful effort to keep video game history alive. It’s a smattering of independent companies striving to do it, while companies actively harm those efforts by erasing studios and everything around them. All of this isn’t even to mention the years of work Monolith spent making a Wonder Woman game that we’ll likely never see or hear anything about — another thing lost to time. It’s hard to look at the video game industry falling apart and not thing, decades down the line, will we even have anything left for posterity? Will the influence and legacy of studios like Monolith turn to dust as the industry endlessly pursues ever-greater, and more out of reach, profits?