After more than 15 years making games, Liverpool-based studio Bizarre Creations closed its doors in February after its owner of over three years, Activision, failed to find a buyer. We catch up with the studio’s former creative director Martyn Chudley along with his wife, former commercial director Sarah Chudley, and former design manager Gareth Wilson – lead designer of Blur and now chief game designer at Sumo Digital – to talk about the studio’s evolution and look at the reasons behind its passing.
Before the buyout by Activision, was Bizarre Creations struggling?
Martyn Chudley: No. We had money in the bank, and several potential projects to work on. However, coming towards the end of Project Gotham Racing 4 and The Club, we took a decision that – as signing up new projects was a time-consuming and costly venture – affiliating ourselves more closely to a publisher would help provide security [to] safeguard the future, given that there would be no downtime between projects, or needing to go though the whole demo/pitch/negotiate cycle. Activision’s desire for a racing project just seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Also, with our then current partners, Microsoft didn’t want an action team, and Sega didn’t need a racing team. With Activision, with the racing desire and Bond licence, the entire studio was deemed a great fit.
From left: Gareth Wilson, now at Sumo; Martyn Chudley, Bizarre’s creative director; and Sarah Chudley, Bizarre’s commercial director
How did the atmosphere at the studio differ across the Bizarre years, Microsoft years and Activision years? Where they three different flavours of studio?
MC: I don’t think the atmosphere differed too much during the years before Activision – we were always proudly independent, and we always tried our best to do what we felt was right for our people, the games and the company. However, when Activision took over, we – and they themselves, I’m sure – really felt that they would leave our culture alone, and for a while it was fine, but slowly, as it seems happens with many corporate takeovers, the feeling did start to change. We weren’t an independent studio making ‘our’ games any more – we were making games to fill slots. Although we did all believe in them, they were more the products of committees and analysts. And when you add in corporate HR, corporate email, etc, the culture we’d worked on for so long gradually eroded just enough that it wasn’t ‘ours’ any more.
Sarah Chudley: I suppose it’s a telling thing that in the last weeks, many people were saying they would never work anywhere like Bizarre again – and there’s a surprising number of individuals and startups who are therefore looking to go it alone.
Gareth Wilson: As the studio got bigger there was a bit of a loss of that intimate, family feeling, not through the fault of anyone but simply just the reality of managing so many people. It’s a challenge for any studio these days to make everyone on the team feel like they’re really contributing to the game when there could be well over 100 people on a single game in production.
How did the production of Blur differ to the production of PGR?
MC: Blur was a strange one in that we started the project with no idea what the end product would be. The feedback from Activision was that we needed a racing franchise to fit within a certain segment of the market, to stay away from other segments, to create a franchise that was fun, accessible and unique, and one that was not PGR. The clean sheet of paper that Blur presented us with probably didn’t play to our strengths. I think the game achieved all of its goals, but it just didn’t resonate with the games-buying public, which is a real shame. Perhaps it was the blending of genres, as with The Club and Fur Fighters, that contributed to its commercial failure. It was probably just too tough to pigeonhole.
SC: I think Activision’s involvement in the whole process, from design meetings through feature choices, from locations through to the name and branding, was a big change from what we’d seen in the past. Microsoft, Sega and Sony/Psygnosis were more hands-off. So that’s something we had to get used to, especially in the final stages of design and development.
GW: Ultimately the game got delayed so we could reach the level of quality we were happy with at Bizarre, which messed up our marketing campaign and gave us a less-favourable release date.
Was there a chance to buy back the studio?
MC: Without going into details, yes, there was, but I personally thought that there was far greater potential for the security and well-being of the company if a third party could come in. Sadly, this was not to be the case.
SC: In any case, Bizarre had grown even more since they took over, and we just don’t have the skills, capability or finances to look after over 200 people. Martyn and I were always small-company people, which is why we stepped aside when we realised it needed big-company skills to manage.
A buyout by a big publisher is often intended to future-proof a studio, so why didn’t this work out for Bizarre – were there key mistakes made by either party?
GW: Why Bizarre was closed is way beyond my pay scale. If you want a personal opinion, though, I think it was a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances. If anything, the mistake we made was underestimating how difficult it was getting a new IP off the ground at this stage of the console cycle, especially in the racing space, which tends to perform better when a new console is launched.