Late in 2008, Electronic Arts announced company-wide layoffs, and venerable Vancouver studio Black Box was hit hard.

In today’s Georgia Straight is my conversation with Jason DeLong, executive producer of the upcoming Skate 3 about how his team fared after the layoffs and the move from the swank downtown Vancouver studio to the large EA Canada campus in Burnaby.

He was candid and honest, and what I learned is that things may have been rough, but they got better.

It’s been a tough year for video-game giant Electronic Arts, which reported a net loss of US$391 million in its latest quarterly earnings statement and is anticipating an overall loss at the end of its current fiscal year. But things have been doubly rough for EA Black Box, the local studio that develops the California-based company’s popular Need for Speed and Skate franchises.