Video game publisher THQ has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will seek a buyer to help it recover from years of business and creative missteps.
The Agoura Hills company, best known for the "Saint's Row" franchise and World Wrestling Entertainment licensed games, is working with private investment firm Clearlake Capital Group, which has agreed to enter a $60-million "stalking horse" bid for THQ's U.S. assets. Any would-be suitor for THQ would have to offer more than that.
Valued at $2 billion as recently as 2007, THQ's market value at the end of trading Tuesday was about $11.3 million.
Once THQ's largest source of profit, the market for kids' games based on licenses from companies such as Pixar and DreamWorks Animation has virtually evaporated.
An effort to revive its kids business with a device called UDraw proved a disaster. THQ vastly overestimated demand for it on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles during the 2011 holiday season.
Amid ongoing layoffs, product cancellations, and the sale or shutdown of many of its production studios, THQ has tried to stay alive by focusing on so-called hard-core action titles aimed at the biggest spending young male gamers.
But while a few such as "Saints Row the Third" and "Homefront" have sold decently, others like "Darksiders II" and "Red Faction: Armageddon" performed poorly.
In May it hired a new president, video game industry veteran Jason Rubin, to oversee production and help the company find a way out of its death spiral of falling stock price and a shortage of capital.
In November it began working with Centerview Partners, a financial advisory firm that has close ties to Rubin.
As it continues to operate in Chapter 11, THQ has obtained commitments for about $37.5 million of debtor-in-possession financing from Clearlake and Wells Fargo.
It has several games in the works for 2013, the most highly anticipated of which is "South Park: The Stick of Truth," based on the long-running Comedy Central show.
“The sale and filing are necessary next steps to complete THQ’s transformation and position the company for the future, as we remain confident in our existing pipeline of games, the strength of our studios and THQ’s deep bench of talent," chief executive Brian Farrell said in a statement.
Added Rubin: "We have incredible, creative talent here at THQ. We look forward to partnering with experienced investors for a new start as we will continue to use our intellectual property assets to develop high-quality core games, create new franchise titles, and drive demand through both traditional and digital channels."
A group of ANC delegates from the North West told NewsFire they were illegally detained and beaten by police, and that their accommodation in Bloemfontein was searched without a warrant.
These delegates are aligned with the "Forces of Change" faction of the party and were denied accreditation at the beginning of the ANC's elective conference in Mangaung.
According to the group, police arrived at their house in Bloemfontein on Wednesday afternoon. Police were allowed onto the property, yet proceeded to kick down the door to the house and search it.
Police claimed to be looking for "weapons and heavy weapons", but found nothing.
In the course of the raid, the people in the house were told by police to strip off their shirts and were then taken outside and forced to lie on the ground, where their hands were bound behind their backs with cable ties. One person, too scared to allow NewsFire to use his name, claims that he was kicked in the mouth by police.
NewsFire saw at least two people at the Central police station in Bloemfontein, attempting to lay charges.
A resident at the delegates' house said that this raid followed a raid on Monday in which police without a warrant wanted to search the house and cars for weapons, which the delegates allowed. Nothing was found.
Volksblad reported on the Monday raid earlier in the week, saying that a group of ANC delegates were targeted by heavily armed police looking for weapons.
Delegates detained in Wednesday’s raid told NewsFire that the raid was conducted by regular South African Police Service (SAPS) officers accompanied by men in camouflage uniform and wearing balaclavas.
The only police unit known to wear camouflage uniform is the Strategic Task Force, an elite unit of less than a hundred members countrywide, who undergo rigorous training akin to the military reconnaissance unit.
The delegates from the North West are aligned with the "Forces of Change" faction of the ANC who are opposed to President Jacob Zuma's second term as ANC preThe power of such an explosion was incredible. Picks, shovels, sledgehammers, rocks, lumps of coal, empty coal-cars and human bodies were flung down the tunnels like pellets in the barrel of a shotgun. The electric power was snuffed out and the fans which pushed air into the mines were bent and put out of action. Not infrequently fires were started in the coal seams and the sulphurous fumes contaminated the whole area. Men who had escaped the vengeance of the explosion might then die from suffocation.
In the gloomy half-darkness of the mines men were sometimes caught between moving cars and the supporting timbers, and their bodies and limbs mangled horribly. Sometimes a hapless miner was caught between the top of a loaded coal-car and the periodic collar-poles which supported the roof. The space between the top of the car and the bottom of the horizontal collar-poles was rarely more than six or eight inches. As the car was pulled along the track, the miner's body was "rolled" very much as a pencil may be rolled between one's hands, crushing ribs, pelvis and shoulder bones to bits.
Within a few years after the mines were opened electric locomotives began to replace the horses and mules which pulled the underground trains of coal. Power for those machines came from naked cables suspended from the tunnel roofs. The wire was never more than a foot or so above the motorman's head; many motor operators accidentally touched it and were electrocuted. Other miners straightened up at an unfortunate moment, or stumbled over cross-ties and touched the deadly cable. The consequence was always death or serious injury.
But the most frequent accidents were the roof falls. Most of the coal in the plateau has a slate bottom with a layer of sandstone on top. This overlying sandstone is separated from the coal by a shield of slate, sometimes two or three feet thick. This soft slate adheres weakly to the sandstone. It could be held up only by numerous stout timbers or, in more recent years, by steel roof bolts. With startling frequency huge slabs of the slate broke loose from the sandstone and, splintering oak collar-poles and hickory jack props, crashed onto the heads of the miners, crushing their bodies against the muddy floor. Many miners who worked through this era used crowbars and jacks to raise tons of fallen rock from the flattened bodies of their fellow workmen. An aged Negro once related to me how he and two of his "buddies" loaded the pancake-flat remains of a foreman and two miners into a coal car for removal to the outside. Their bodies, he said, were ground into the floor and the miners scraped them loose with their huge coal shovels. As he put it, "We had to jest shovel 'em up." But such slate falls were not always fatal. Often they crushed spines, arms and legs and left the miners grotesquely mangled and twisted.
The black powder used in the mines was another dreadful breaker of men. The fire-train fuse so widely employed before the electric fuse replaced it was not always reliable, and the spitting trail of fire sometimes diminished to a slow smolder inside the tamped hole. After waiting a long interval for the fire to eat its way to the charge and thinking the shot had failed, the disappointed miner approached his working place "to pull the charge." All too many times he arrived just as the fire ate its way into the charge of powder, and with a roar tons of coal were blasted at him. Men were slain in this way and others were reduced to lifelong cripples. Still others were blinded by particles of fine coal which were thrown into their unprotected eyes.
没有评论:
发表评论