2K Australia

» see 2kaustralia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

BioShock's credits carry two studios. One of them was in Canberra, which is not a city the box or the marketing ever mentioned, and which is roughly nine thousand kilometers from anywhere the game was set or sold. I played the games. I could not have told you the second studio existed until I went looking for the reason it stopped.

It opened on 27 April 2000 as Irrational Games Australia, a subsidiary set up by Irrational and run by Jonathan Chey, one of the three people who had founded the parent in Boston. Take-Two bought Irrational in January 2006 and put the whole thing under its 2K label, and on 10 August 2007, days before BioShock shipped, the two halves were formally separated. Boston became 2K Boston. Canberra became 2K Australia.

The name kept moving after that. Between April 2010 and November 2011 the Canberra studio was made to operate under the banner of a different 2K studio entirely, 2K Marin, while it worked on the game that eventually shipped as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Chey left in 2011 to start Blue Manchu. By then the studio had been through three names in eleven years without ever moving out of the building.

~ the case file ~

~ what they shipped ~

The list reads like a support credit for most of its length. Freedom Force in 2002, Tribes: Vengeance in 2004, SWAT 4 in 2005 and its expansion in 2006, every one of them assisting the parent studio in Boston. Then came BioShock in 2007, co-developed rather than assisted. BioShock 2 followed in 2010 with Marin, and BioShock Infinite in 2013 back under Irrational. A shared byline on all three entries in one of the most decorated series of the era.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel in October 2014 was the only time Canberra held the pen. Gearbox provided development support rather than the other way round, the game was set on Elpis and ran low-gravity, and it put an Australian accent into the marketing for the first time. It was also the last thing the studio ever shipped, six months before the door closed.

~ the last year ~

2K had been planning to move the studio from Canberra to Melbourne, and the reporting after the closure is consistent that this is what did the real damage. Senior staff did not want to relocate and left, and the studio lost the people it would have needed to survive an expensive year. When the announcement came, the public reason given was the cost of running a development operation in a country where labor costs more than it does in the United States.

Fifty-eight people were made redundant. The date carries a one-day disagreement that is worth recording rather than resolving: Wikipedia's infobox gives 15 April 2015, and the reporting filed out of Canberra is dated the 16th. That gap is a time zone, not a dispute. Australia was already the next day.

~ what was left in canberra ~

2K Australia was the last AAA studio in the country when it closed. Not the last games company, because Australia has a large and healthy independent scene and always did, but the last place where somebody in Australia could work on a hundred-million-dollar console game without emigrating. That job category simply stopped existing in April 2015.

2kaustralia.com now redirects to 2k.com, where there is no page for the studio and no mention that Canberra was ever involved in anything. The BioShock credits are the only durable record, and they are in a file most players never open.

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