Take-Two's Rockstar Vienna studio, which has worked on the Xbox version of GTA as well as Max Payne (Xbox) and Max Payne 2 (Xbox, PS2) has reportedly been shut down by parent company Take-Two Interactive.

The news came this week amidst the craziness of E3 from Rockstar Vienna developer Jurie Horneman, who wrote about his disappointment in his personal blog. As Horneman pointed out, there's still no official announcement regarding the closure by Take-Two corporate.

"It turned out Take-Two has closed their Rockstar Vienna office, effective immediately, 'due to the challenging environment facing the video game business and our Company during this platform transition,'" Horneman explained.

More than 100 employees have lost their jobs and the closure also has taken its toll on the Austrian development scene. "This being Europe, I am not going to be living under a bridge tomorrow, but nevertheless this is a big upheaval," he continued. "As far as I know, Rockstar Vienna was the biggest game development studio in Germany and Austria... Many of my coworkers - those with families and houses, those with roots in Vienna, those who invested many years of their lives in this company, those who moved here from abroad - are in difficult positions. There are few game development companies in Vienna. In the last year or so, several have let people go, merged or closed down. One hundred people will not easily find new jobs in the games business here."

Horneman added that in some ways the closure comes as a relief to him because he felt physically and emotionally drained. He classified the work as "deeply unsatisfying" and said that he's not been pleased with Rockstar's direction.

"I wanted to do things that push the medium, and that was just not happening for me. Ironically so, since Sam Houser really wants to push the medium too, and I respect him for it. Somewhere in between, something got lost," he lamented. He then added, "The Hot Coffee brouhaha, ridiculous as it was in many respects, did nothing to increase the popularity of Rockstar Games both inside and outside of the industry. Whichever way you look at it, game development has become a bit harder for everyone because of that incident."

Horneman also pointed to the blog of one of his former co-workers, Leander Schock, who for the past 4 years worked as a senior animator and lead artist on an unnamed project. It's not clear whether or not Rockstar Vienna's current project has been scrapped. "I hope the project I have currently worked on still will be finished somehow - otherwise all work-related efforts I've invested into this game over the last 2 years, leading a group of 15 artists and animators, were flushed down the toilet and I can't even show anyone our great work," wrote Shock. "It's very sad - especially since the team we had was incredible good and each one was a guru of his field."

For more insight on the studio's being shut down, check out the two blogs linked above.