Nearly a decade later, 38 Studios employees start getting their final paychecks

According to a report in Bloomberg News, former employees of 38 Studios (the RPG/MMORPG studio founded by former Boston Red Sox player Curt Schilling) are finally receiving their last paychecks that the company owed them when it collapsed.

Bankruptcy documents filed by 38 Studios Trustee Jeoffrey Burtch state that employees will receive between 14 percent and 20 percent of the money owed by the company.

An anonymous former 38 Studios employee told Bloomberg that they’d received their check, but others have apparently been sent to old addresses of employees, who’ve had to move around the country for new jobs in the years since the studio ran out of money.

38 Studios’ bankruptcy and collapse had a dramatic impact not just on the game industry, but also the New England tri-state area. The company had been built in part thanks to a loan from the Rhode Island state government, and its bankruptcy left developers underpaid, underwater with their mortgages, and the state of Rhode Island in a small financial crisis.

The studio had been built in part to support Schilling’s vision of developing a massively multiplayer online game that could compete with World of Warcraft. The studio managed to ship the critically acclaimed (but only modestly financially performing) Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning before it collapsed.

While his former employees struggled to make ends, Schilling would go on to become a right-wing political figure, and eventually lose his ESPN commentating job over a series of transphobic social media posts.

This year he posted in support of pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the United States Capitol on January 6, possibly costing him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.