This is a very hard post for me to write, not only am I personally and quite emotionally involved, but I am also still under a strict NDA and as such I can only point you to search the internet for many of the other leaks on the topic.
But finally I can perhaps explain why the number of blog posts I have been making has dried up; I often said it was because I was busy.
On January 2nd 2019 I walked into my first day of development on Project Blackbird as part of the core engine tech team with my employer The Multiplayer Group and as a founding member of the project with Zenimax Online.
The project as it stood the day it was cancelled was, is, stunning to look at. Alex Tardiff lead the standing up of a brand new renderer from the ground up, a brand new engine was also stood up along side this and the two interoperated superbly.
Early in the development we did a lot of research, selecting technology, containers and performance considerations; we stood up a project with a handful of people and scaled it sucessfully to hundreds. Standing up a new engine, a new renderer and the complete tooling stack for it is no mean feat. Think an almost skunkworks kind of deal, with just a dozen members standing up something like Unreal 4; then scaling it out to something which in my opinion visually looked better than Unreal 5, with all the tooling, all the content creation to roll out experience after experience coming together nicely... Within just over six and a half years!
The experience of playing was incredible, the mechanics in the game unique, the world in which the player experienced the game mezmerising.
The team was amazing, sure we had ups and downs, but we were one under the Blackbird banner and until 4:03pm Wednesday 2ny July 2025 we believed there would be a cornerstone gameplay experience delivered on PC, XBox and Playstation 5.... Alas, no more.
As you may understand I am extremely upset by these events, finding constant moments of almost grief, automated message reminders still appearing from headless accounts, sprint goals all planned out but no actions to make, I am bereft of purpose, I am emotional, I was a BLACKBIRD.
https://www.trueachievements.com/news/canceled-xbox-mmo-project-blackbird
https://insider-gaming.com/phil-spencer-loved-zenimaxs-new-mmorpg-but-it-was-canceled-anyway/
https://www.eurogamer.net/zenimax-online-studios-head-matt-firor-announces-departure-following-widespread-layoffs-and-the-cancellation-of-in-development-mmo
