Romero departs Slipgate, Minecraft crash

Via Bigdownloads:

id Software founder John Romero has decided to depart the latest game developer company that he helped to form, the San Fransisco-based Slipgate Ironworks. Earlier this week it was revealed that Romero was teaming up with his long time friend and business partner Tom Hall on a new social networking game developer called Loot Drop.

Romero formed Slipgate Ironworks in 2005 and said at the time that it was developing a new but unnamed MMO project. Later it was revealed that the company was part of the many MMO game studios from Gazillion Entertainment. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to Big Download, "John is no longer working with Gazillion. We parted ways late last year, and we wish him nothing but the best in the future."

It's been nearly five years since Slipgate Ironworks was formed yet the developer has yet to reveal the game project or projects it has been working on for all that time. Gazillion's spokesperson gave us a small update on Slipgate Ironworks, saying, ... "the studio is working on a key project in Gazillion. John's MMO project was changed and shifted out to later in the pipeline, as the company decided to move it to an in-browser platform which is an area of focus for Gazillion's future titles. We have not announced a release date for this title and John was not involved with the new plans."

Hmm, 5 years and nothing to show for it? Anyone remember Dikatana? I wonder if Romero fell back into old habits. We shall see.

Minecraft Website down.

A victim of its own success, the website for Minecraft appears to have crashed for awhile. As stated by its creator Markus "Notch" Persson:

"We've got five servers behind a load balancer, and a dedicated server for payment processing, and another for ingame authentication and login, although that won't be in use until we update the game launcher." However the web site's sales and player stats for Minecraft are not yet back up to speed."

Hey, even World of Warcraft crashed when it was released. So far, he is doing pretty good.