Behaviour Santiago

~ the obit ~

Wanako Games started in Santiago in 2002 with four founders, among them Wenceslao Casares and Santiago Bilinkis, who were already known in the region for building and selling internet companies. The early catalog is the kind of work that paid the rent in the mid-2000s: Ford Virtual Racing, Jewel Thief, Tornado Jockey, browser and download titles made on contract for portals that needed something to put in front of an ad.

Assault Heroes changed the address. It came out on Xbox Live Arcade in December 2006, a twin-stick shooter with a jeep and a lot of explosions, and it was one of the early downloadable titles that convinced people the service was worth watching. A Chilean studio had put a game on an American console storefront and it had sold. Vivendi Games bought the company two months later for ten million dollars and parked it under Sierra Online.

Then the ownership carousel started. Vivendi merged with Activision in July 2008, Activision did not want a casual-games studio in Chile, and in December it sold Wanako to Artificial Mind and Movement in Montreal. When A2M renamed itself Behaviour Interactive in November 2010, the Santiago office was renamed with it and stopped having a name of its own.

Under Behaviour it did licensed work at volume. Doritos Crash Course and a version of Tetris came out in 2010, followed by Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime and two Wipeout tie-ins the year after, and by 2015 the office was making a SpongeBob platformer alongside a Peanuts movie game. That same year its name went on Fallout Shelter, which Behaviour built with Bethesda and which became one of the most downloaded mobile games of the decade. The rumor that followed, that Bethesda was buying the Chilean studio outright, turned out to be nothing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Latin American game development barely registers in the histories, and Santiago registers least of all. Argentina and Brazil at least had domestic publishers and a local market big enough to argue about. Chile had a handful of studios of which this was the largest, and its route to the world ran entirely through foreign storefronts, first Xbox Live Arcade and later the app stores.

None of this reached me. Buying anything on Xbox Live Arcade in 2006 meant owning the console and holding a Microsoft points balance, while the gaming I grew up inside was a PC in Turkey and whatever the shop downstairs sold on disc. By the time Fallout Shelter arrived in 2015 I could have installed it in ten seconds and would still have had no idea who built it. That anonymity is what contract development buys you, and it is why the four founders are named at the top of this page.

~ the montreal decision ~

On 20 November 2017 Behaviour Interactive confirmed to Gamasutra that the Santiago studio was closing. The statement said the company's vision for its current projects and future ambition required important technological and creative innovations, and that the Montreal ecosystem, with its talent pool and training programs, was better suited to achieving its long-term goals. Thirty people were laid off. Everyone was reportedly offered the option of moving to Canada, which is an offer that works differently depending on who has a family in Santiago.

A mobile game based on Westworld was finished before the doors closed and shipped on 1 February 2018, ten weeks after the studio that made it stopped existing. In June 2018 Bethesda sued Warner Bros. and Behaviour Interactive in a Maryland federal court, claiming the Westworld game reused code from an early build of Fallout Shelter, down to a bug that appeared in both. Warner Bros. called the claim unsubstantiated. The last thing this office shipped went on to be argued over in a copyright suit about the other game it had worked on.

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