Midway's Obsession with GTA Led to Cancellation of The Suffering 3

The dark psychological action series The Suffering might have continued and concluded Tork's story, but the promising third part was doomed by the short-sighted ambitions of publisher Midway's management. Creative director and lead game designer Richard Rouse III revealed details of the project's cancellation, explaining how blindly copying other hits destroyed the original horror franchise.

The relationship between developers at Surreal Software and the publisher was initially built on strict demands. After the commercial success of the original The Suffering in 2004, Midway acquired the studio to expand its portfolio beyond sports simulators and fighting games. Instead of allowing a full development cycle of two to three years, management demanded a sequel in just one year, trying to streamline production of dark action games. The team managed to deliver The Suffering: Ties That Bind on time, hoping to later tackle a large-scale third part on more powerful hardware.

Chasing GTA's Success

Plans for the trilogy were shattered by the shift in console generations and a sharp change in the publisher's priorities. With the arrival of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Midway's top management became obsessed with the massive sales of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto series. Executives convinced themselves that the industry's future belonged exclusively to giant sandboxes with car rides and criminal freedom, while linear adventure and story-driven action games had lost their commercial appeal.

As a result, all work on The Suffering 3 was halted, and the Surreal Software team was forcibly reassigned to develop an ambitious GTA clone called This is Vegas. The project was conceived as a large-scale simulation of Las Vegas nightlife with casinos, parties, and criminal syndicate clashes. The publisher spared no expense, hoping to grab a share of the market from the creators of open-world crime sandboxes.

Midway's calculation turned into a crushing fiasco. The development of This is Vegas dragged on for years, plagued by production hell and consuming over $40 million, but the game never reached release. Meanwhile, the seventh-generation market quickly proved the publisher's strategy wrong, as some of the era's biggest blockbusters were precisely linear cinematic action games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. A series of failed management decisions and the wasteful spending on unreleased projects led Midway to bankruptcy in 2009. Surreal Software was shut down, and Tork's story remained without its planned conclusion.