Why THQ shut down: A look inside

"We really made some questionable business deals. Near the end, we were still getting screwed for Nickelodeon games, which we hadn't worked on in years. We still owed a ton of money."

- An unnamed former THQ staffer Polygon today published an expose on the troubles that lead to the disintegration of publisher THQ -- which was cut up and sold off in early 2013 after a catastrophic bankruptcy. In 2007, Tracy Lien writes, the company was at the apex of its success; by 2012, it was facing delisting from the NASDAQ stock exchange. The piece puts the problem not just at the foot of the collapsing kids' game market, as the quote above suggests, but a company at cross-purposes, with core and kids' businesses that undercut each other at every turn. "You could feel it when you walked through the different departments. You could hear it in the tone. There was a feeling that one side had these huge budgets and was given all this money while the other side was scraping by on smaller budgets," former THQ SVP of core games Dave Davis told Polygon. The full article is quite a read.