February 26^th, 2005 (3:17am) - RPG developer Troika Games has shut down, with final confirmation of the closure coming from co-CEO Leonard Boyarsky after weeks of rumors about the fate of the studio.

"As many of you may have already heard, Troika has laid off all of its employees and is closing its doors due to our inability to secure funding for future projects," Boyarsky wrote in an email posted on fan site called No Mutants Allowed.

"We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years," he continued, "it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company."

Troika was created in 1998 by the design team who created the classic RPG Fallout for Interplay. Troika later went on to make three more games in the past six years, them being Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and most recently, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Although critically acclaimed, the firm’s titles were targeted at very small parts of the RPG market, and failed to achieve significant commercial success, most significantly Bloodlines, which was based on the Half-Life 2 engine and whose release coincided with the same Friday as Valve’s Half-Life 2.