The saga of Shadow of the Eternals, Precursor Games’ “spiritual successor” to the beloved GameCube classic from Silicon Knights, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, isn’t over just yet, but it’s been put on hold for the time being. Silicon Knights founder and Precursor Chief Creative Officer Denis Dyack confirmed as much in a new forum post, adding that “when and if the time is right we will get together and start it up again.”
Dyack doesn’t offer any specific reasons for the change in status in his post, saying only that “we all worked on this project as a labor of love and self financed 100 percent of everything for a over a year to try to make Shadow of the Eternals a reality.” The financial strain of self-funding likely proved to be too much, especially given that Precursor tried, and failed, to find enough support in its pair of crowd-funding initiatives.
The Eternals project was first revealed in May 2013, with the initial Kickstarter bid launching just days after gamers got their first look. That campaign was ultimately cancelled, and it was followed by a second one that failed to meet its goal. Precursor also likely suffered from the PR hit that it took when one of the company’s co-founders was arrested on multiple counts of child pornography. While the studio’s boss, Paul Caporicci, acted quickly to distance the team from the actions of the now-former employee, it was a very ugly public incident.
Between all of that, along with what were likely failed efforts to find funding for Eternals using more traditional publishing routes, you can get a sense of the fatigue the Precursor folks are probably feeling. Dyack’s post suggests that everyone is going to now take a break. There’s no timetable for when they might get back together, and no indication that Precursor will be working on something else now that Eternals is out of play.
