That's right, no joke this time. Effective October 1st I will be on extended unpaid leave from Meridian 59 development and management. I'm not leaving in anger and will retain my co-ownership of the company and seat on the Board of Directors to help guide the company as a whole. Also I will of course be available for any questions the team may have or any bugs they need my skills to fix.

This month I'll be finishing up my work on the next small content patch (finishing, testing, and bug fixing the level and monster) and working with Gilroy to implement another account maintenance feature. We also have some art on order from John Marshall, creator of the masks and the Thrasher. These will likely be done after 10-1 but when they are I'll compile the artwork into BGFs. These are my last projects on the game for the foreseeable future. The patch will probably be implemented after I've taken leave.

In 1998 I retired from full time game development to take care of my family. Although I continued to take small contracts I was able to complete my work while my son was off at school and still be a full-time father. This still worked well enough with Meridian 59 although there were times where the family had to take a back seat to NDS. However as many of you know, I has a second son last year. My original intent was to take leave of M59 development and management when he was born, but there was just too much work left to be done to get the client released. So now that the client is released I will be tying up my last projects and turning off the computer for a while. I don't know how long but I don't expect to be reading these message boards very often and so I wanted to give time to the community to discuss this with me as you see fit.

I want to be very clear that I consider Meridian 59's resurrection to be a success. NDS saved the game from 3DO's janitor's closet and trash bins. We cleaned it up and brought it back adding features and balance that every Meridian 59 developer can be proud of. As a shining glory MisterY stepped in and together we revamped the client and server to extend the game client making it much more user-friendly. These things we've done and will continue to do over coming years have ensured that Meridian 59 won't die again anytime soon.

At this point I don't know when I'll be back. It'll be a few years before my second son is old enough for school. =) As I've told you all many times I have a HUGE list of things I want to add or refine in Meridian 59. So the trick is finding the balance of enough time to actually accomplish something while not neglecting my chosen path as full-time parent.

You've seen us post from time to time that we may need to get "real jobs", for me "daddy" is my real job =) If it turns out that Psychochild has to take leave of NDS for a "real job" I will come back at least part time to help manage Meridian 59 until the other guys gain enough experience to do it without us. Be assured that we want you to be able to play the game and will do our best to be sure you will always be able to.

I'm sure that there will be discussion and questions to follow. =)

Re: http://www.gilcon.net/m59forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4162

Source: Q - rob@neardeathstudios.com