Neverwinter Nights developer shuts down

The developer of Neverwinter Nights has officially shut up shop - but don't worry, it isn't the Neverwinter Nights you're thinking of. This is Stormfront Studios, not BioWare.

Stormfront Studios was originally founded in 1988 under the name of Beyond Studios and worked on a whole slew of popular RPGs, including The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and the original Neverwinter Nights. The company even developed the first ever play-by-email game in the form of Quantum Space, which was distributed by AOL.

The original Neverwinter Nights is held up by many as the first ever graphical massively multiplayer online game and was recently honoured at CES 2008.

The developer had fallen on hard times recently however and was more well known for film tie-ins such as the Eragon and Spiderwick Chronicles games.

All 33 Stormfront employees were informed of the closure on Monday according to news from Next-gen.biz. The reasons for the closure were given as a problem with the economy and slowed revenue on current projects.

Honestly, it seems that too many developers are shutting right now, so take a moment to honour the dead in the forums.