Curt Schilling Says He Lost His Baseball Fortune in 38 Studios

Former Curt Schilling finds himself in some financial trouble after his video game company 38 Studios went belly up. Schilling says he probably lost $50 million in the venture and he’s facing a lawsuit from Citizens Bank who wants to hold him responsible for the money owed by the company (they say he personally vouched for it).

Schilling, who founded the company six years ago, said he personally invested more than $50 million in the company, in addition to $5 million to $10 million from other wealthy investors and a $75 million loan guarantee it received from the state of Rhode Island to entice it to move to Providence last year. But Schilling said it wasn’t enough to remain in operation until it could complete its flagship project, a online multiplayer role-playing game code-named Copernicus, which was scheduled to be released next June.

Schilling also said that he botched his promise to let the company’s employees know that it was going to go bankrupt.

“The employees got blindsided,” Schilling said. “They have every right to be upset. I always told everybody if something were going to happen, you‘re going to have a month or two of lead time, and I bombed on that one in epic fashion.”

He says that he never took a penny in salary and put everything he had into the company. He thought that the company was going to be saved—it was supposedly close to a deal with a major video game publisher to create a sequel to it’s original title Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. But, Schilling says that talks collapsed when the governor of Rhode Island publicly said that he was looking for a way to keep the company solvent. [Boston Globe]