Airtight Games

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

~ the last words ~

Airtight Games was four people and twenty-four thousand dollars in the autumn of 2004. Jim Deal left Microsoft Game Studios with three others off the Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge team and each of them put in six thousand. Ed Fries, who had run Microsoft Game Studios and had just walked away from it himself, came on as a co-founder and contributed advice rather than money.

Console development costs eight figures and nobody hands that to a five-person company, so the first years went on proving the team could build something. A 2005 contract with the physics-hardware firm AGEIA paid for demos. THQ signed an eight-month pre-production deal in 2006 and then declined to greenlight it. Capcom ran background checks on the staff and signed Dark Void at the end of that year, which is the deal that made the studio real. By the summer of 2009 there were about sixty people in the building.

Dark Void came out in January 2010 with a jetpack and vertical cover, and it did not work. Quantum Conundrum followed in June 2012, published by Square Enix and directed by Kim Swift, who had made Portal, and it was well liked without selling like one. Square Enix then handed them Murdered: Soul Suspect, a detective game in which the detective is a ghost. Fourteen people were laid off in April 2014 and Swift left for Amazon. The game shipped in June to reviews that mostly shrugged.

By the first days of July the studio was gone. There was no announcement and no statement. A GeekWire reporter drove to the Redmond office on 2 July 2014 and found the door locked and a sign on it advertising a blow out sale on the equipment inside. The only word from the company came later, as a short note thanking the people who had made ten years possible.

~ the record ~

~ twenty-four thousand dollars ~

Deal described the founding problem plainly enough: you walk up to a publisher, shake hands, give the pitch, then ask for ten million dollars, and they look at you. The twenty-four thousand was not seed capital in any venture sense. It covered the gap between four salaried jobs at Microsoft ending and somebody agreeing to pay for a demo.

The AGEIA contract is the part worth noticing. A hardware company needed software that showed off its physics card, and a studio with no game needed a reason to keep building an engine anyway. That arrangement carried the company through 2005 and produced the technology Capcom eventually bought into.

~ what a work-for-hire studio owns ~

Every game Airtight is known for belonged to somebody else. Capcom owned Dark Void. Square Enix owned Quantum Conundrum and Murdered: Soul Suspect. What the studio owned outright was an Ouya launch game called Soul Fjord and two small iOS titles, which is roughly the scale a shop like this can self-fund between contracts. When the contracts stop there is no catalog underneath to fall back on, and no royalty stream either.

These games reached Turkey as Steam entries at a discount. Dark Void and Quantum Conundrum were both in bundles and sales within a couple of years of release, which after 2009 was the route by which most mid-tier Western games got here at all. A splash screen with a studio logo on it goes past in two seconds when the game cost four dollars, and I could not have told you who made either one until I looked it up for this.

~ the locked door ~

Murdered: Soul Suspect came out on 3 June 2014. The studio was shut within a month of its own release, which means the decision was effectively taken before anyone outside the building had played it. Square Enix said nothing. Airtight had no publisher to announce anything on its behalf and nothing left of its own to announce it with.

airtightgames.com still returns a 200 today. What it returns is a redirect to a casino affiliate page with the studio's name sitting in the URL, which is what becomes of a lapsed domain that once had inbound links worth harvesting. The diving-helmet logo is on the Internet Archive and nowhere else.

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