Ladies and Gentlemen,
Eleven years ago today, X-strike Studios was formed when a domain name was officially registered and a bare-bones site was created with a small teaser for a fan-made River City Ransom movie. Over the course of those eleven years we’ve busted out five feature length films, 250ish podcast episodes, radio dramas, documentaries and tons of shorts. It’s with that in mind, and a heavy heart that today we announce that the time has come for X-strike Studios to go quietly in the night.
X-strike Studios will be closing its doors sometime in early 2015.
We made the decision a few weeks ago, just before the Cracked article hit the web, but this has been a long time coming. Over the course of the past several years, anyone will have noticed that our production has fallen off significantly. There’s a number of reasons for this; the foremost of which being that our lives have just changed so much since the company was born in 2003. Back then we were either still in college or just out of college with nothing but time on our hands, living in very close proximity to one another. Since then people have gradually moved apart, real jobs were attained, ladies were wooed into holy matrimony, and general life obligations have made the process of video production all the more difficult. With this in mind, coupled with a number of other factors, we decided the time has come to step away from X-strike and move on to new endeavors.
So what can you expect out of X-strike Studios in the next year?
For one this does not affect the River City Rumble reprint in any way. We had been discussing a reprint of the DVD for a while and the surge of interest generated from the Cracked article was the kick in the pants we needed to make it happen. We’ll be printing extra copies to have available at conventions so anyone who wants a copy should have the chance.
You can also still expect a few last pieces of content from X-strike. We have a few shorts left to produce for our Kickstarter backers and the TripleRaidio podcast will continue for the foreseeable future. I’m sure some of you are hoping to hear exactly what we had planned for Eternal Horror and that information will get out there in some way too. We will be at MAGFest 8.5 (spoiler) and MAGFest 13 with our usual table and panels as something of a farewell tour. Of course, as individuals we’ll never stop going to MAGFest because MAGFest is awesome. The website itself won’t be going anywhere for the time being and while it may get stripped down a bit next year, most all the content and the store will be there indefinitely.
So that’s the long and short of it ladies and gentlemen. Being a part of X-strike Studios has been a long and wonderful journey but it’s time to say goodbye. Or at least, start saying goodbye. We’d like to thank all of dudes who put their time and energy into making X-strike Studios what it was over the course of the past decade: Chad, Rory, Darrin, Steve, Rich, Jaekwon, Cory, Brett, Mahoney and Dave. We’d like to thank all of the numerous people who donated their time to be part of a movie, be it as actors, extras, costumes, or crew. We never quite made it to the “paying people” phase of being a movie company so this was purely folks donating their free time to have fun and help us out. We’d like to thank the musicians who put their time and talent into making some fantastic music for our projects, be it in the form of original tunes or game remixes for RCR. Dale North and A_Rival’s soundtracks for Silent Horror and Project Snake are still available for purchase - buy them!
Most of all though we would like to thank our absolutely amazing fan base. We’ve received an incredible level of support from you all over the years, most of all in helping our Off Campus Kickstarter campaign be a rousing success. As X-strike staffers have come and gone, and our production has waned over the past few years, our fans have remained supportive of us every step of the way and we’re proud to now call many of you our friends. So for all of you that donated money to the Kickstarter, helped us with editing equipment, drove for hours to be a zombie in Resident Horror, or just never stopped shouting our name from the hilltops to anyone who would listen, thank you.
If anyone has any questions that I didn't cover, please let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them.
- Tim, Juese and Ben