Human Head, allegedly, did not want to sell up.

However, sources from within Human Head suggested that Bethesda started playing 'hardball' by trying to buy the studio, which couldn't stay comfortably afloat without the publishers' investment in the project. An IGN exposГ© by Mitch Dyer in 2013 suggests that the success of the trailer lent Human Head an extra six months of development on Prey 2, which was very nearly finished. However, all was not well behind the scenes. Prey 2 had a gameplay demo at E3 in 2011 after developing the title for a few years. So, why such a long gap between the beloved Prey in 2006 and working on Brink as a support studio in 2011? The infamous Prey 2 debacle, that's what. The FPS trend continued with some support work on Splash Damage's Brink (2011), a parkour-focused action-arcade multiplayer shooter. The sci-fi FPS really caught the imagination of gamers with wild uses of gravity and portals, becoming one of those long-running third-party Xbox exclusives that players on the green box could point to with pride. While the team had been making Blair Witch Volume II: The Legend of Coffin Rock (2000), Rune (2000), Rune spin-offs (2000-2001), and later Dead Man's Hand (2004) for the original Xbox, it is Prey (2006) that put the marker in the ground for Human Head as a dev team to look out for on Xbox. Human Head, the development team led by Chris Rhinehart, had been around since 1997.

On the very same day, Roundhouse Studios was born under the Zenimax portfolio in one of the strangest industry moves ever seen, and one that left legal trouble in its wake. A day later, on November 13th, Human Head closed its doors. The Human Head team published Rune II on November 12th, 2019. Human Head and Roundhouse have the exact same staff and are in the exact same office. Roundhouse was formed in 2019 under the Bethesda Game Studios label after being reformed from a developer called Human Head Studios.

Rune 2 lawsuit