Harvey Smith departs Midway Austin

Midway Austin’s creative director Harvey Smith has left the studio.

A report on Gametap quotes Midway-Austin studio head Denise Fulton as saying the move was "by mutual agreement between Harvey and the studio."

It’s not known if the news is connected to Smith’s recent comments about Midway Austin’s latest production, Area 51, at this week’s Montreal Game Summit.

Smith painted the game’s production as tumultuous (the game had been delayed and only recently released), saying the development was "fucked up".

"Everyone was forced to share tech. It took eight months to get one thing working," he had said. "With a year to go, the game was disastrously off rails […] it went straight from alpha to final."

Previously, Smith had worked for Ion Storm and Looking Glass, playing a key creative role in the likes of the Thief and Deus Ex series – coincidentally, a sequel to the latter, Deus Ex 3, has just gone into preproduction at Eidos Montreal.