We've received confirmation this morning that the name
Midway Games is no more after today. The company will drop it's over fifty year old name, and continue operations under a Warner Bros. moniker effective Monday July 13th, 2009. It is likely they will be operating now under the
Warner Brothers Games moniker. Development of
Mortal Kombat 9 should be unchanged but will just continue under the new company name. I'd also expect to see re-releases of any of intellectual property
purchased by Warner Brothers earlier this month without the Midway name attached to it.
Additional confirmation can be seen from a few of the Mortal Kombat developers on Twitter. Both
Hector Sanchez and
Hans Lo have put out their own tributes to the company name on their feeds today.
As someone who grew up with the Midway name being on most of my favorite games at the arcades, and later on the home video game consoles, this is quite an end to an era. I was always proud that Midway Games was centered in Chicago. Because of that, I got to see a lot of arcade games early because of the location testing at our local arcades. In my opinion, I think the name was perfect, and had such a vast storied history there is no reason to throw that away. Midway Games as a name will truly be missed, and will sadly have to go into the history books without being given a chance to make a better name for itself under it's tenure being owned by Warner Bros.
We'll post more as we know more. But remember,
Mortal Kombat 9 development continues, just the name of the company on the box changes.
Update 1 7/13/2009: We reworded the article to be clear that this is not sourced on a few Twitter updates, but instead employees of the company confirming this change has happened effective midnight on July 10th, 2009.
Update 2 7/27/2009: It appears now that
former Midway employees are updating their LinkedIn profiles to reflect the new name of
Warner Bros Games Chicago as we previously hinted at.