If you could save one now defunct studio, who would it be and why?

[Bofferbrauer2]

HoloDust said:

Troika Games for me - made by folks who created original Fallout, then went on to give CRPG community cult classics such as Arcanum and Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines... CRPGs thrive in A/AA space, AAA is creative death for them.

Troika Games had their fate baked into their name:

• Troika means "3 of a kind" in Russian
• 3 as in 3 head developers of the original Fallout games (Leonard Boyarsky, Tim Cain, and Jason Anderson)
• 3 as in 3 games they developed at Troika Games (Arcanum, the Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines)
• 3 as in The Fallout title they wanted to develop (and crucially, started to develop) - but got outbid by Bethesda, which was the final blow to the company

What mostly killed the company was however the very bad sales of VtM:Bloodlines. 74k, only half of ToEE (128k) and a quarter of Arcanum (248k). This was due to Activision contractually wasn't allowed to release the game before Half-Life 2, so Activision honored it... by releasing the game the fucking same day as HL2! Seriously, how blind can those execs be???