you're right that Mike was the driving force here out of his own free will of course, but it's not exactly just a passion project anymore when the companies involved are going to be making money off of it, and they absolutely will. like i know you couldn't have kept him away from it even if you tried, but this honestly casts a very dim light on the leadership at V (or Deep Silver, or whatever) if they think paying people for all this work wasn't worth it or that it wasn't important, or whatever. this isn't exactly something like the mod tools thing from years back, this is the complete version of the game coming to PC for the first time and something the sr community (that the company claims to love) has wanted for a long, long time. and asked for it very, very loudly and incessantly.
like i've never been more excited about a game (re)release in my whole life and im incredibly grateful to all the people at V who did and do still work on this, it was very sweet of Watson's coworkers to promise him they'll pick the project back up on their own time. but man if the way this was apparently (not) handled by the people in charge doesn't sour me on the company as a whole real bad.