Last month, Obsidian (the studio producing ‘South Park: The Game’) was hit with layoffs and a few members of the South Park team were affected. Today, Danny Bilson, the EVP for Core Games at THQ (the publisher), revealed that the game is still on track and says it will “absolutely be the funniest game ever made.”

Via Michael Futter at RipTen:

MF: You mentioned games that people are really excited for. One of the games that has been on people’s radar since December of last year is the South Park RPG that was announced. I have two questions about that. First, is that still on track and moving forward with Obsidian.

DB: Yes. It absolutely is.

MF: When it was announced, it was slated for a 2012 release. Is that still going to happen?

DB: Potentially, but it’s going to be very close. It’s all about… because that game is being written by Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker]… some of the production process ebbs and flows with their schedule. They are in the middle of a season right now, and as soon as they are done, they get back to the game, and their season takes them out for a couple of months at a time. Again, it’s like I said about Darksiders. We can’t afford to ship it until it’s perfect.

Matt and Trey won’t ship until it’s their vision of this ultimate role playing game, where you’re the new kid in town and it’s like being in a South Park episode. Once all the pieces are together, we’ll announce a date and we’ll ship it. I can tell you from progress and process. I’ve got sections of the game that they’ve completed; they are phenomenal. If you like South Park, and I love South Park, it’s South Park! It’s incredible and it’ll absolutely be the funniest game ever made. There’s no two ways about it.

[Later in the interview…]

MF: We received confirmation that an Obsidian project was canceled in the same week that it was announced the studio had missed their Metacritic bonus by one point. They had to lay off people, as well. It appears, based on what we were able to find, that some of the staff affected worked on the South Park RPG. Obviously, that game is still moving forward, so you weren’t the publisher that canceled the project. It seems like your relationship with Obsidian, and the project they are working on with you, might have been affected by this. How do you deal with that when two other publishers making decisions affect a project you are working on?

DB: It had no effect. Just like any studio, when you downsize, you keep your best people. Think about it. If South Park becomes the lead sku in the studio, it’s just going to have all the most experienced people on it. It didn’t affect us in any way. Obsidian isn’t our studio. If people were removed from that team, they were replaced by more senior people. There was no negative, except for the negative of any studio having to lay off employees. It’s incredibly painful. It wasn’t a game of ours that was canceled there, and I do like Obsidian. I want to see them succeed, and I don’t want to see them stressed by not having enough games, but Feargus seems to feel that he has a pipeline of stuff coming in. So, the answer is, really, that it had no effect.