When the Rockstar Vienna employees were getting ready to go to work yesterday morning there was an unpleasant surprising waiting for them. Take Two closed down the office completly unexpected. Rockstar Vienna was responsible for the Xbox version of GTA3 and GTA: Vice City.

Jurie Horneman, one of the former employees has a weblog called Intelligent Artifice and wrote an entry on his blog about the whole thing:

This morning, as I came into work, I was greeted by security guards. It turned out Take-Two has closed their Rockstar Vienna office, effective immediately, “due to the challenging environment facing the video game business and our Company during this platform transition”.

This is the first time in 15 years that I’ve been laid off, or have had the place where I work shut down. Before now, I have always seen the writing on the wall in time and have gotten out before anything drastic happened. So this is kind of a new experience for me.

This being Europe, I am not going to be living under a bridge tomorrow, but nevertheless this is a big upheaval. As far as I know, Rockstar Vienna was the biggest game development studio in Germany and Austria, with over a hundred employees.

Many of my coworkers - those with families and houses, those with roots in Vienna, those who invested many years of their lives in this company, those who moved here from abroad - are in difficult positions. There are few game development companies in Vienna. In the last year or so, several have let people go, merged or closed down. One hundred people will not easily find new jobs in the games business here.

We at Xboxic wish the Rockstar Vienna employees all the best.
Via Kotaku.