Growing Ritual Exodus, Former Member Reveals New Game

The future of Ritual Entertainment has been pretty bleak as of late, after three key members (and reportedly several level designers too) have recently left the company. The exodus began with the departure of CEO Steve Nix at the end of November, who left Ritual for a Director of Business Development position at id Software, replacing Marty Stratton - who now is an executive producer over at id. Next came (went, actually) QA Manager Michael Russell, who on Monday confirmed on his blog that he is no longer with Ritual Entertainment either, while also hinting at things to come:

"More information later this week. I'd say more now, but I made an agreement with someone inside Ritual that I respect greatly, and I honor my agreements."

And just yesterday, FiringSquad learned about a third high-profile departure: vice-president and co-founder Tom Mustaine.

"The company's vice-president Tom Mustaine has confirmed to us that he has left Ritual, calling his departure "amicable". Mustaine, who was also one of Ritual's co-founders way back in 1996, told us via an email message, "Currently, I'm taking a vacation, then working on some cool new stuff to be announced". He would not confirm on what might currently be happening inside the Dallas based developer; we hope to get some official info from Ritual on the developer's future very soon."

You might remember that Shawn Ketcherside, the lead designer of SiN Episodes: Emergence, had already left the company a few months ago. And if rumours are true and several level designers are also fleeing from the studio, the ten-year old Texan developer might not even make it to its eleventh birthday. Let alone release SiN Episode 2!

On a separate note, another former Ritual member, Steven Peeler (who used to be a Technical Director at Ritual before leaving in 2004) infomed us that he is working on a new game called Depths of Peril, a single-player action
RPG with strong strategy elements. Developed by Soldak Entertainment, the game is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2007, but curiously Steven could not offer us any kind of media (or a website at least) for the time being. Hopefully that will change "in a month or so".

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)